Biodiversity criteria in public procurement and in the building sector – feasibility study & action plans

The consideration of biodiversity in the context of public procurement could have positive effects in terms of biodiversity conservation at various levels, and contribute to the national biodiversity strategy. However, there is in principle a need for research on how the paramount value of "biodiversity" can be integrated within environmental indicators and requirements relating to public procurement. Hence, the overall objective of the planned feasibility study was to work out specific operational concepts in order to take account of biodiversity in the Federal Government's procurement and in the construction sector. This was conducted on the basis of the following work to be performed:

• Systematic compilation of existing biodiversity criteria in existing standards and enterprise management systems, and evaluation or categorization of the criteria covered according to the data acquisition work required and the criterias' significance.
• Assessment of the relevance of the production processes' impact of various product groups for biodiversity; Development of a baseline regarding the biodiversity performance of existing product-related sustainability labels (including existing procurement recommendations); Drawing up a list of optimization potentials (including biodiversity aspects that have not been addressed yet) for existing sustainability standards and procurement recommendations;
• Drawing up action plans for the integration of biodiversity criteria into procurement requirements and product-related sustainability labelling under consideration of the legal basis for public procurement.