Driving Climate Action Through Resilient Supply Chains

Authors

• Tara Norton

  Former Managing Director, BSR

Last week, we marked a significant milestone for business action on climate change. At the Business and Climate Summit, a two-day event during Paris Climate Week, French President François Hollande told a room full of CEOs and other leaders that “business would be key” to reaching a global climate agreement at the COP21 talks this December.

During the same week, luxury giant and BSR member Kering announced that it would open-source its methodology for natural capital accounting, allowing other companies to identify the biggest environmental impacts in their operations and supply chains.

At the summit, Nicolas Moreau, CEO of AXA France, reported that the global insurance company has seen the intensity of extreme-weather events increase within clients’ supply chains, causing serious disruptions in their ability to produce and deliver products and leading to higher costs all around. Moreau’s comment brought into sharp relief the reality that climate change is already upon us and that there is a strong business case for companies to take immediate action on climate impacts in their supply chains.

With that urgency in mind, today, we are launching our report, “Business Action for Climate-Resilient Supply Chains: A Practical Framework,” which is part of BSR’s Business in a Climate-Constrained World strategy to mobilize and accelerate business action on climate.

Our new report is designed to help practitioners involved in sourcing and supply chain sustainability understand how to develop climate-resilient supply chains. It includes a three-step framework to build climate resilience in the supply chain, as well as case studies and examples from BSR member companies. The paper is based on five months of research and analysis, including interviews with BSR member companies from the information and communications technology; consumer products; and food beverage, and agriculture sectors.

We hope that this report will provide tangible and practical guidance, motivating companies to build better practices in global supply chains, and, ideally, to contribute significantly to climate resilience.

To continue the conversation, please join us at one of our upcoming resilient supply chain events (in London on May 28 and New York on June 5), tweet to #BSRclimate, or contact us to explore how we might collaborate.