Best Environmental Management Practice for the Public Administration Sector

This report describes best environmental management practices for public administrations. Best environmental management practices are those techniques, measures and actions that can be implemented by public administrations to minimise their direct and indirect impact on the environment. They were identified together with sectoral experts on the basis of practices actually implemented by environmental frontrunners. The report outlines best practices applicable to all types of public administrations, such as making office buildings more environmentally sustainable, minimising the impacts of meetings and events organised, promoting sustainable commuting and business travel, or adopting green public procurement. Additionally, the report focuses on local authorities, which are the public administrations in highest number within the EU and also where there is the largest potential for replicability of best practices. It identifies best practices that ecompass their policy/regulatory/planning role as well as their role in providing key services to residents in the fields of sustainable energy and climate change, mobility, local ambient air quality, land use, water supply and municipal waste water treatment, noise pollution, green urban areas, green public procurement and environmental education and dissemination of information to citizen and businesses. Alongside best environmental management practices, the report also identifies suitable sector specific environmental performance indicators that can be used to measure and track performance in the areas addressed by each best practice, and, when possible, benchmarks of excellence, corresponding to the level of performance achieved by frontrunners.This report can be used by public administrations as a source of information to identify relevant actions they can implement to improve their environmental performance. This report was also the basis for the development of the EMAS (EU Eco-Management and Audit Scheme) Sectoral Reference Document on Best Environmental Management Practice for the public administration sector (according to Article 46 of Regulation (EC) No 1221/2009).