Challenge

The steel and cement industries, each accounting for 7-8% of global emissions, remain challenging to decarbonize. Stimulating the necessary demand for their adoption requires new value chains and competitive markets for clearly defined net-zero construction products. Government agencies are top purchasers of steel and cement for major projects such as buildings, roads and bridges, making their procurement policies a powerful tool in creating markets for low emission materials.

Solution

Coordinated by UNIDO and co-led by UK and India, Clean Energy Ministerial’s (CEM) IDDI is a coalition of government initiatives and organizations designed to create lead markets for low-emission industrial materials. The coalition is composed of several working groups embedding the public and private sector, to focus on establishing data and reporting frameworks, harmonizing low-emission standards and definitions, and advocating for public procurement commitments. As part of the commitments under the IDDI’s Green Public Procurement (GPP) pledge, the governments of Canada, Germany, US and UK held preliminary consultations for their policy-making processes, including requests for information, focus groups, consultations with experts and technical workshops to address policy actions’ development and implementation. In the working groups, stakeholders who are developing policies gather feedback from the affected private actors, so that new policies can be better understood and improved.

Impact

The consultation processes influenced new policies and programmes, as well as updates of existing procurement criteria that promote near-zero steel and cement, and advance market readiness through increased procurement. Involving the private sector in the policy-making process increased viability, timely implementation, commitment and compliance, while ensuring an effective allocation of resources and sharing of firsthand operational knowledge to the public sector. The signatories’ annual progress reports and an upcoming report quantifying the impact of these commitments on CO2 emissions showcase these successes.