Nature-Positive Procurement: Mainstreaming biodiversity in transport infrastructure procurement

Each year, governments and development banks invest billions of dollars in transport and other large-scale infrastructure. Up to 4.7 million kilometres of new roads and a doubling or quadrupling of port areas are anticipated by 2050—developments that are severe drivers of habitat loss worldwide, cutting through ecosystems and leaving wildlife populations isolated and disconnected.

Public procurement is an important lever to ensure nature-positive approaches gain traction in infrastructure development. According to World Bank data, over 80% of investments in railways and roads were sponsored by public bodies and state-owned enterprises in 2017, indicating that the investments were channelled through public procurement processes.

However, procurement processes are currently ill equipped to reduce the biodiversity impacts of such investments and to implement nature-based solutions. Procurers rarely reward contractors for bringing nature-positive innovation into their bids, nor do they set meaningful tender criteria to reduce the supply chain impacts on nature. This is a missed opportunity because procurement has real power to scale up nature-positive approaches in infrastructure development.

IISD is building the evidence base for the procurement of nature-positive transport infrastructure, including a blueprint for integrating biodiversity across the procurement life cycle and a series of dialogues with development banks, governments, and procurement experts. The findings will feed into a policy-oriented summary brief for decision-makers.

IISD will also develop a set of case studies illustrating how biodiversity considerations have been integrated into transport procurement in practice, a technical handbook offering procurement practitioners a step-by-step guide for embedding nature-positive approaches, and an online training program.

This project is part of the Greening Transportation Infrastructure Development Integrated Program (GRID IP), a program funded by the Global Environment Facility and led by WWF-US, in partnership with the Asian Development Bank and the UN Environment Programme. GRID IP supports national projects in Malaysia, Nepal, the Philippines, Suriname, and Ukraine. Within this program, IISD leads the workstream on mainstreaming biodiversity into transport infrastructure procurement.