Governmental green public procurement (GPP) programs specify the emissions standards that products must meet to be purchased or funded by government. As a major buyer of many industrial infrastructure outputs, such as steel and cement, a government’s GPP program can create a large and lucrative lead market for green production technologies, encouraging scaling and driving down costs.

This dataset provides an overview of product and service categories where GPP can have the greatest policy, budget, and environmental impact. A UNEP survey of 41 countries published in 2017 found that priority categories are those that are often purchased centrally or for basic day-to-day operations, such as office information technology, office paper and stationery, vehicles, cleaning products and services, or furniture (UNEP 2017c). The second group of priorities are high cost categories related to building construction, including building equipment and materials and energy.