Green Procurement Playbook 2025

Procurement has made progress in promoting sustainability, but meeting organizational and regulatory commitments requires action from a broad span of leaders. Over the past year, the World Economic Forum and Kearney have engaged with more than 100 CPOs across sectors and regions to understand what is working and what is holding companies back. The findings are clear: further progress depends not just on ambition, but also on alignment. Procurement can deliver real, material sustainability impact, but only if it is empowered with the structures, mandates and investments to fully address the challenges and opportunities – which only CEOs can approve. Procurement decisions shape the vast majority of a company’s environmental footprint. In many sectors, upstream activities such as materials, components and services represent over 90% of total emissions. That makes procurement not just relevant to sustainability, but essential. It can also unlock innovation, strengthen resilience and differentiate your business in a changing market landscape, with truly sustainable growth. This playbook outlines a path forward. It includes a practical Stages of Excellence Assessment that gauges maturity and eight building blocks of green procurement, covering supplier engagement, governance, data, capability building and more. These tools are for your CPO and leadership teams, but the shift starts with you. Why? After initial progress, many of the barriers to further progress are not technical – they are organizational and beyond the remit of procurement. Already, many purchasing offices have made valuable gains, but have a long way to go. Meeting publicly committed targets and regulatory requirements becomes incrementally harder and requires whole-organization thinking and action. Changing what and how your company buys means changing incentives, processes, culture and priorities. It means creating space for procurement to lead and ensuring sustainability is embedded into investment decisions, product design and performance metrics. These elements cut across the entire organization, requiring broad thinking and action. This is a significant opportunity. By elevating procurement to the strategic agenda, CEOs can accelerate progress on climate goals, reduce supply chain risk and future-proof the business. The companies moving fastest are those where sustainability is not a side project, but built into how decisions are made across the enterprise. We hope this playbook equips your teams to take the next step, and encourages you to champion the changes only you can facilitate. The time has come to launch a dialogue on shaping progress towards green goals. You can include green procurement on the CEO agenda, elevate the role of procurement, encourage cross-functional action, and release resources and investments. The legacy of your climate ambition will come from what you enable today. Note to Chief Executive Officers Green Procurement Playbook: The CPO’s Guide to Delivering Value for Business and Planet 4