EU Datathon 2022 preselection for the Equinox platform

What is the EU Datathon?

The EU Datathon is an annual Open Data competition organised by the Publications Office of the European Union since 2017. The competitions are organised to create new value for citizens through innovation and promoting the use of open data, in particular the datasets available on the official portal for European data.

Every year, EU Datathon calls for innovators from around the world to come up with new ways of using open data to address important societal and environmental challenges, with the condition that they use at least one of the thousands of data sets published on data.europa.eu.

This year’s edition of EU Datathon was launched on 7 February 2022 and featured the following open challenges:

• Challenge 1: The European Green Deal
• Challenge 2: Transparency in public procurement
• Challenge 3: EU public procurement opportunities for young people
• Challenge 4: A Europe fit for the digital age

The EU Datathon 2022 Equinox Proposal

As Open Risk we submitted a proposal under Challenge 2 (Transparency in Public Procurement) that aims to integrate the rich dataset of the TED (Tenders Electronic Daily) dedicated to European public procurement into Equinox, thereby offering an innovative and powerful platform that supports green public procurement using the full machinery of Sustainable Portfolio Management .

TED publishes 676 thousand procurement notices a year, including 258 thousand calls for tenders which are worth approximately €670 billion. It thus represents a material fraction of the EU economy and hence its corresponding environmental impact. That impact is expressed (among others) through Greenhouse Gas Emissions , other pollution vectors, land-use changes and biodiversity loss. Understanding and using the procurement data trove offers an opportunity for diverse stakeholders (governments, local authorities, analysts, participants in public procurement) to build informed, data driven decision systems that can support the monumental and challenging green transition that is already underway.

Specifically, for this proposal we aim to combine Eurostat Environmentally Enhanced Input-Output data and GHG Protocol best practices and methodologies to attribute (where applicable and feasible) GHG emissions to procurement contracts. Starting with the basic attribution, procurement managers and other stakeholders can perform a range of ex-post and ex-ante analyses to understand the environmental footprint of procurement and better allocate economic resources.

We are very happy to announce that the proposal has been pre-selected to enter the formal stage of the competition!

What comes next

We will continue building Equinox as a platform supporting Green Public Procurement using all relevant open data and look forward to reach the finals in October 2022! Your feedback, ideas and contributions, whether technical or non-technical are welcome for example:

• on our github repository where the development of equinox happens as an open source project
• at the Open Risk Commons

Learn more

• The Sustainable Finance knowledge base at of the Open Risk Manual
• Introduction to Input-Output Models using Python course at the Open Risk Academy
• A theoretical framework and White Paper