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Blog | Thursday September 11, 2025

From the Frontlines of Scope 3: Key Lessons from Supplier Engagement Initiatives

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When it comes to climate action, Scope 3 emissions can feel like an iceberg—massive, unavoidable, and, if left unaddressed, threatening to sink real climate progress. Yet navigating this challenge also presents one of the greatest opportunities to chart a course toward meaningful climate action.  

 A key strategy lies in working closely with suppliers to tackle emissions together. More and more companies are requesting suppliers’ emissions data and providing them with resources to set climate targets. This growing commitment signals a clear need for deeper collaboration and a desire to scale climate action across value chains. As voluntary bodies like SBTi and jurisdictional authorities alike push for greater disclosures around supplier engagement, and as intensifying climate impacts continue to manifest as risks for businesses worldwide, the urgency and opportunity to scale supplier collaboration have never been clearer. 

To accelerate companies’ progress on supplier engagement, BSR, in partnership with We Mean Business, CDP, Ceres, The Environmental Defense Fund, and Exponential Roadmap Initiative hosted The Supplier Cascade. This collaborative initiative brought together global companies across industries to discuss effective supplier engagement strategies, learn from each other’s challenges and successes, and pilot the Supplier Cascade approach.  

BSR observed three themes regarding company supplier engagement initiatives that reflect the progress made, remaining challenges, and considerations for other companies to take forward: 

1. Supplier Engagement Looks Different for Everyone 

Companies pursue supplier engagement through a range of approaches. Some prioritize and segment suppliers by spend, others by emissions, materials, by how advanced (or nascent) suppliers are on sustainability, or simply by the strength of the existing relationships. The approach a company takes can also be influenced by the level of connection between internal sustainability and the procurement team.  

While certain companies are developing their own standards, scorecards, metrics, and incentive structures to engage suppliers, others are aligning with, or establishing, industry norms and common practices (e.g., Transform to Net Zero Supplier Transformation Framework, Pharmaceutical Supply Chain Initiative Principles for Responsible Supply Chain Management, Responsible Business Alliance Supplier Code of Conduct). And whereas some companies focus on direct training and upskilling to report or to decarbonize, others are exploring other means of incentivizing action—both financial and nonfinancial.   

The Takeaway: There is not a single standard approach to prioritizing and engaging suppliers across the value chain. Buyers and suppliers alike need greater industry collaboration and alignment to streamline expectations and actions. Survey fatigue, duplicative scorecards, and divergent standards and expectations among customers all burden suppliers, so despite different approaches to supplier engagement, going it alone is rarely the answer. 

2. Supplier Responses Will Vary 

Suppliers bring different levels of readiness, capacity, and resources to climate action. Some are highly informed and are already taking action or collaborating with other partners, whereas others are at the very beginning of their journey. At the same time, many suppliers operate in thin-margin industries and face extreme pressures to keep costs low, limiting the financial and human resources they can dedicate to internal climate actions or otherwise complicating their engagements with buyers.  

Suppliers’ responses are also shaped by external factors, including regulations, policy environments, other stakeholders’ demands, and the degree to which buyers are willing to truly partner with and support their suppliers on climate. These factors all serve to enable or constrain progress. In addition, language differences and cultural contexts can add further complexity to engagement. 

The Takeaway: Supplier engagement does not occur in a vacuum. Companies must recognize that suppliers are navigating diverse local contexts, resource constraints, and various climate- and sustainability-related demands from other customers. Progress is accelerated when buyers identify and leverage synergies with their peers to align on climate-related expectations and provide differentiated supplier support to match their asks of suppliers. 

3. Data Is Critical, but Should Not Be a Barrier 

Collecting supplier data is a significant undertaking. Companies often engage with large numbers of suppliers, work across vast and complex datasets, and navigate multiple platforms that can either facilitate or complicate progress. Challenges in obtaining data can be multi-faceted, ranging from simply getting suppliers to respond to requests, to verifying the quality or accuracy of numbers reported, to comparing potentially unlike datapoints, metrics, or calculation methodologies.  

The Takeaway: While data is essential, it should not become an obstacle or the sole focus of supplier engagement efforts. Companies can ease the burden by remaining flexible on how and where information is collected and disclosed, keeping the focus on driving progress. For example, for non-responsive suppliers, companies may supplement data with publicly available information. To ease the reporting burden on suppliers and minimize the need for divergent tracking efforts among buyers’ procurement staff, sustainability teams may pursue cross-industry efforts to align on asks of suppliers.  

Looking Ahead:  

Momentum is building on supplier engagement, and incentive schemes are showing positive results. In 2024, 41% of companies that disclosed to CDP reported engaging suppliers on climate, and 52% of suppliers were more likely to reduce annual emissions when offered financial incentives. According to CDP, training and upskilling can increase the likelihood that suppliers complete climate-related assessments by 1.7 times, and suppliers who received support from buyers to set a science-based target were 2.6 times more likely to do so.  

However, challenges remain, and adoption of stronger supplier engagement efforts remains low. In 2024, only 13% of buyers included climate-related requirements in supplier contracts, and only 2% of companies offered financial-based rewards.  

Companies have an opportunity to translate supplier engagement into real progress on Scope 3 reductions by strengthening engagement efforts and integrating climate-related expectations into procurement processes. At the same time, companies should not lose sight of the need to accompany climate-related asks with strong incentives and support mechanisms, and should ultimately collaborate to produce measurable emissions reductions. These ‘below the waterline’ collaborations are essential to surface and address the hidden challenges in the iceberg that is Scope 3.   

To further help companies, BSR and Supplier Cascade partners have developed new guidance that dives deeper into the lessons learned, successes, challenges, and case studies from the Supplier Cascade collaboration. By working hand in hand with suppliers, companies can chart a new course toward meaningful impact. 

Interested in working with BSR to address your company’s Scope 3 emissions ? Contact  BSR’s Climate & Nature team.   

Acknowledgment: The Supplier Cascade campaign was created and funded by the We Mean Business Coalition. 

Blog | Tuesday September 9, 2025

Partnering with Suppliers to Advance Human Rights Due Diligence

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As regulatory frameworks and stakeholder expectations on business and human rights continue to evolve, companies are increasingly expected not only to assess and manage their own impacts, but also to work collaboratively with suppliers to do the same.  

Evolving Expectations for Supplier Engagement 

While the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs) do not set out explicit expectations for companies to support or partner with their suppliers on due diligence, they set out broader responsibilities. Principles 13 and 19, for example, emphasize that companies should seek to prevent or mitigate adverse impacts they are linked to through business relationships, and to take appropriate action based on their relation to the impact. 

Traditionally, the core attributes of supply chain management have included the following:  

Strategy and governance, including clear supply chain commitments and defined roles and responsibilities; standards and policies (validated through engagement of cross-functional leaders); audits and enforcement (protocols informed by resources, risk, and influence); goals and enablers (in the form of financial and non-financial incentives); and capacity-building for buyers, suppliers, and other stakeholders. 

However, this approach is evolving as companies are increasingly moving beyond one-size-fits-all compliance mechanisms towards partnership-based supply chain management. Rather than a top-down imposition of expectations, best practice emphasizes dialogue between buyers and suppliers, leveraging suppliers’ supply chain expertise for a more strategic approach to managing human rights issues. A good example of this comes from the palm oil sector, where buyers and suppliers have worked closely together to address the devastating effects of deforestation and human rights impacts like child and forced labor through collaboration, joint initiatives, and mutual ambition-setting, rather than expectations being dictated from the bottom of the supply chain up. 

Tools for Supplier Engagement 

Buyers can actively support their suppliers in enhancing their human rights management practices through targeted collaboration and tailored support initiatives. This may require focusing on strategic suppliers first to develop partnership models, but like due diligence, this approach should extend across the supply chain. 

There is a vast ecosystem of resources available to help companies and suppliers collaborate on human rights due diligence. Key engagement tools include: 

• Policy and Commitment Support: Providing frameworks and best practices to help suppliers establish strong internal policies and public commitments to human rights. 
• Due Diligence Tools: Supplier self-assessment questionnaires (SAQs) and other due diligence tools to enable systematic identification, monitoring, and management of human rights risks. 
• Joint Initiatives: Collaborating on Human Rights Impact Assessments (HRIAs) to combine expertise, pinpoint potential impacts, and develop joint action plans to address identified risks. 
• Training and Capacity Building: Offering educational resources and training sessions that empower supplier teams to manage and improve human rights practices. 
• Worker Engagement Mechanisms: Facilitating effective worker feedback through tools such as anonymous reporting systems and regular communication channels. 

These tools are most effective when introduced through collaboration rather than imposition. Before initiating programs, companies should talk to their suppliers to understand what tools they are already using and consider which initiatives might work best based on the suppliers’ respective profiles. Understanding this context fosters trust and enables more effective implementation. 

Case Study 1: Designing and Scaling a Supplier Engagement Program for a Global Apparel Brand 

In 2024, BSR partnered with a leading global apparel brand and six strategic suppliers to create and roll out a worker engagement program aimed at tackling systemic labor rights issues in the supply chain—specifically around fair recruitment, wages, and working hours. 

The program was designed to foster joint action between the brand and those suppliers, with a focus on addressing the root causes of the issues. Eventually, factories would be empowered to establish and maintain robust management systems, ensuring ongoing respect, protection, and advancement of human and labor rights within their facilities. 

BSR partnered with the brand, the strategic suppliers, and a global technology platform to develop two worker engagement modules and tailor them with input from the suppliers and their employees. These were jointly administered between the parties, and the remediation and mitigation of identified root causes will be jointly run by the brand and suppliers. 

Key actions included: 

• Conducting factory-level management system assessments on fair recruitment, working hours, and wages 
• Providing practical resources aligned with identified improvement areas to elevate supplier practices 
• Tracking and evaluating progressive improvements along a maturity curve 
• Integrating worker perspectives to gauge the effectiveness of management actions, highlight remaining gaps, and guide ongoing remediation 
• Providing suppliers with a maturity assessment and access to a range of tools to help them remedy any issues, following completion of the modules. 

The assessments and worker surveys strengthened suppliers’ knowledge and capacity on priority issues and helped them gain insight into root causes through direct worker feedback. The result was a replicable framework for scaling supplier engagement across geographies, and a partnership model between buyers and suppliers to tackle identified root cause issues. 

Case Study 2: A Collaborative Approach via Action for Sustainable Derivatives (ASD) 

The Action for Sustainable Derivatives (ASD) initiative offers another compelling example of a partnership model in practice. In 2024, ASD launched its human rights strategy, identifying high-risk issues in palm supply chains, including land rights violations, forced labor, and gender-based violence, based on a previously conducted collective Human Rights Impact Assessment (HRIA). Building on the findings of the HRIA, ASD translated the findings into targeted collective activities, prioritizing the most salient impacts where members have influence and leverage. 

Key elements of ASD’s approach include: 

• Collaboration between buyers and suppliers 
• Deployment of an operational grievance mechanism (OGM), funded collaboratively  
• Prioritization of a few key issues based on a collective HRIA, followed by collective and collaborative action to address these 

This model illustrates how cross-company collaboration, underpinned by a shared vision for responsible sourcing, can achieve greater transparency and impact than unilateral efforts. 

Advancing Partnership-Based Due Diligence 

As companies work to operationalize human rights due diligence, it is essential to move from a compliance mindset to a partnership mindset. 

However, challenges remain: many suppliers are resource-constrained, wary of external monitoring, or skeptical of buyer intentions. Yet through dialogue, co-design, and mutual accountability, companies can foster trust and long-term impact. 

At BSR, we partner with companies in developing innovative, context-specific strategies for supplier engagement. Please reach out to our team to find out more about how we can support you in advancing your supply chain management. 

Blog | Wednesday September 3, 2025

What’s Next? Building on a Corporate-Level Human Rights Assessment

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Completing a corporate-level human rights assessment (HRA) is a significant milestone. It provides clarity on a company’s salient human rights risks across its entire value chain, helps to address stakeholder expectations, and grounds a company’s policy commitments in credible evidence. While the scope and depth of a corporate-level HRA vary depending on objectives, its value is consistent: it simplifies a complex landscape into a clear roadmap for action. It also offers a defensible rationale for prioritizing where to focus deeper due diligence, aligning with the growing expectations of investors, regulators, civil society, and human rights benchmarks. 

However, an HRA is not the finish line. It is the beginning of a process to transform insights into an ongoing due diligence cycle that delivers meaningful outcomes for people and measurable results for the business. Leading companies distinguish themselves not by completing a single assessment, but by building on it—focusing on the most severe risks, designing operating models that scale, measuring progress against defined indicators, and using grievance and remedy mechanisms as engines for continuous learning. 

This approach is increasingly codified in global standards and regulation. The UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs) and the OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises emphasize that due diligence must be continuous. Emerging regulations, including what was formerly referred to as the EU Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD) and the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) formalize this expectation, requiring companies to identify and assess impacts, take action, track effectiveness, and report results on an ongoing basis. 

From a Corporate-Level HRA to Action: Six Key Workstreams 

There is no single formula for what comes after a corporate-level HRA. However, based on BSR’s experience supporting companies to design and deliver robust assessments as part of broader human rights due diligence, six priority workstreams consistently emerge. These workstreams show how companies can move from a one-time assessment to a fully embedded, ongoing due diligence process—one that not only manages risk but also delivers sustained impact for people and the business. 

1. Deep-Dive Human Rights Impact Assessments (HRIA) Where it Matters Most: A corporate-level HRA helps identify where risks are most severe in the value chain, guiding targeted deep dives—by site (a country or facility), issue (e.g., forced labor, freedom of association), product/customer (high-leverage relationships), or moment in time (market entry, acquisition, supply shocks). HRIAs are carried out from the perspective of rightsholders, providing real-time insights that strengthen mitigation strategies and support effective remediation planning in line with the expectations set by the UNGPs, OECD Guidelines, and various regulatory requirements. 
2. Strategy Development: Corporate-level HRAs establish a company’s overall risk and impact profile, highlighting salient issues and management gaps. Acting on these findings requires developing a clear strategy for managing and integrating human rights into business operations, supported by short-, medium-, and long-term goals. A well-defined strategy aligns priorities, ensures sustained action to mitigate and remediate impacts, embeds changes into the business model, and builds the capacity needed to address human rights challenges effectively. 
3. Monitoring and Reporting: Following a corporate-level HRA, define goals and KPIs that align with both stakeholder and regulatory expectations. Stakeholder pressure on reporting after assessments and due diligence is growing, from regulators, investors, and beyond. Companies should therefore prepare for increased disclosure of human rights assessment outcomes, more issue-specific reports for well-defined audiences on the most severe impacts, and where appropriate, full publication of HRIAs. Those that move beyond one-off assessments to adopt a transparent, continuous due diligence approach will be best placed to meet growing reporting expectations from stakeholders and regulators alike. 
4. Integration: The findings from a corporate-level HRA should not remain on the shelf—they need to be embedded into the company’s daily operations. This means updating relevant policies, procedures, and practices, and developing targeted mitigation and remedy action plans. Beyond this, socializing these concepts and changes with relevant teams and focusing on integrating human rights considerations into day-to-day activities is a critical step for successful, long-term change. Integration turns the HRA from a one-off exercise into a living process, improving visibility over human rights risks, strengthening management, and enabling progress tracking. 
5. Training: To maximize impact, employees need the skills and knowledge to understand salient human rights impacts, identify potential issues in their daily work, and adapt to updated processes. Targeted, role-specific training raises awareness, builds capability, and ensures timely and effective responses when risks arise. 
6. Corporate-Level HRA Refresh: Plan a refresh every 4-5 years, or sooner, when there are material changes to the business that can impact the company’s footprint and risk profile.  

A corporate-level HRA is the starting point of a journey, not its end. The months after completing the assessment are critical for building momentum—continuing to engage team members that were interviewed or consulted as part of the HRA process, embedding findings into operations, establishing clear strategies, training teams, and more. This is how companies shift from a snapshot in time to a continuous, credible human rights due diligence process. 

The steps outlined above—deep-diving HRIAs, strategy development, monitoring and reporting, integration, training, and periodic refresh—are proven ways to transform insight into action. Taken together, they help companies strengthen risk management, meet rising stakeholder and regulatory expectations, and most importantly, deliver positive outcomes for people affected by business activities. 

BSR supports companies at every stage of this process. From conducting the initial corporate-level HRA to building the governance structures, tools, and capabilities needed for ongoing due diligence, BSR brings sector expertise, a global perspective, and a practical focus on solutions that teams can implement and sustain. 

For companies ready to move beyond assessment into sustained action, now is the time to set the tone, align leadership, and embed human rights due diligence into everyday business. BSR can help make that transition clear, strategic, and impactful.  

If you are considering launching a corporate-level HRA or deciding what should come next, we encourage you to reach out to BSR’s Human Rights team.

Blog | Tuesday August 26, 2025

Mining and the Just Transition: Putting People at the Center of the Energy Transition

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The mining industry plays a dual role in climate change: while the industry contributes 4 to 7 percent of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, it is also an essential enabler of the clean energy transition, supplying the minerals needed for renewable energy technologies and low-carbon infrastructure. These transition minerals will play a pivotal role in supporting the global transition to a low-carbon economy because renewable energy technologies (e.g., solar panels, wind turbines, batteries, etc.), rely on copper, lithium, nickel, cobalt, and rare earth elements. While the recycling of transition minerals should be prioritized wherever possible, it will be insufficient to meet skyrocketing demand in the short to medium term given limited supply of recyclable materials, making the development of new and expanded mines necessary. However, any new or expanded mines must be developed only under the strictest ecological safeguards and with full respect for human rights, to avoid repeating the environmental destruction, social conflict, and rights violations that have too often accompanied mining in the past. 

Among governments, civil society, Indigenous leaders, multilateral institutions like the ILO, as well as industry coalitions such as the ICMM, there is a growing consensus that the mining industry must undergo a just transition to address its dual role as both a driver of climate harm and an enabler of climate solutions. At its core, a just transition in the mining industry means that the benefits and burdens of the global energy shift are shared fairly, and that mining companies proactively uphold human rights and justice as they adapt to a decarbonizing economy and expand operations to meet growing demand. A just transition requires mining operations to become far cleaner and safer than in the past, treating environmental protection and respect for human rights as non-negotiable priorities. 

For mining companies, action on just transition falls into three areas: in their own operations, in their supply chains, and in the communities in which they operate. Their just transition actions should be built upon an unwavering goal of reaching net zero by 2050 and commitment to respecting human rights. Meeting these goals would involve conducting ongoing environmental and human rights due diligence, upholding the highest standards, and considering, mitigating, and remedying the impacts to people in their decarbonization efforts and beyond.  

BSR recommends that responsible mining companies focus on: 

• Climate Action with a Human Lens: Integrate social impacts into climate mitigation and adaptation efforts to ensure people, not just emissions and impacts to infastructure, are considered in transition plans and climate action. Mitigate harms to people, and where harms do occur, provide remedy. Consider those actions caused and contributed to by the company, as well as those linked to the company through business relationships. 
• Environmental Responsibility: Minimize impacts on nature and the environment, and safeguard against worker and community harm through responsible land, water, waste, and pollution management. Limit impacts to biodiversity, land disturbance, water use, waste, and pollution. 
• Respect for Workers and Just Labor Practices: Uphold labor and human rights, including fair wages, safe working conditions, freedom of association, and collective bargaining. Manage mine closures, automation, and changes to the workforce and production through transparent social dialogue (e.g., negotiation and consultation between workers, employers, and sometimes governments), reskilling, compensation, and worker-inclusive transition planning to ensure no one is left behind from decarbonization efforts. 
• Responsible Supply Chains: Apply environmental, human rights, and just transition standards across procurement of equipment, materials, and services. Use due diligence to ensure suppliers meet ethical and sustainability expectations, and set clear expectations for just labor practices around decarbonization and expectations on respecting human rights to suppliers. 
• Stakeholder Engagement and Social Dialogue: Foster inclusive, transparent, and continuous engagement with key stakeholders that will be impacted by the transition, especially workers (through social dialogue) and communities (including Indigenous people), to inform decision-making and build mutual trust. Establish formal mechanisms for dialogue, engagement, grievances, and participation to ensure voices are heard and incorporated throughout the transition process. 
• Community Rights, Consent, and Inclusion: With over 50 percent of known reserves of transition minerals like copper, lithium, and others located on or near Indigenous and agrarian community lands, respect for Free, Prior, and Informed Consent (FPIC) is critical. Recognize and integrate Indigenous Peoples Principles and Protocols for Just Transition into company approaches. 
• Benefit-Sharing and Local Development: Ensure communities share in the value created through royalties, equity, local hiring, and infrastructure investment. Go beyond impact mitigation to build long-term regional resilience, trust, and partnership. Rely on co-creation to ensure that mining is carried out with the community, not just in the community.  

The mining sector bears a responsibility to implement a just transition that addresses its distinctive challenges. Mining companies can become champions of a just transition by transforming the way they do business: cutting emissions, innovating cleaner processes, upholding labor and human rights, and sharing benefits with local communities. Through honest engagement, benefit-sharing, rights protection, and long-term investment in regional well-being, mining companies can provide a foundation built on social trust and consent, allowing for the energy transition to be just, equitable, and inclusive.  

Interested in learning more about just transition or taking action across your mining operations, supply chains, and communities? Connect with BSR’s Energy and Extractives team to learn how we can support. 

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