Supply Chain Decarbonization: A Four Step Guide
You’ve heard the saying “you are what you eat”, but what about “you are what you use”? What you use as a business is important in understanding your organization's sustainability. Moreover, in determining the emissions from your suppliers in your supply chain, your organization can better assess its unique carbon footprint and again, understand its environmental impact.
The term of supply chain decarbonization perfectly encompasses this concept and process of achieving a carbon neutral supply chain. We’ve put together a quick guide of what supply chain decarbonization is, why it’s important, and how our team at RyeStrategy works with clients like your business to decarbonize their supply chain.
What Is Supply Chain Decarbonization & Why Is It Important?
Let’s start with the basics and break it down: what even is supply chain decarbonization?
Supply chain decarbonization, simply put, is reducing carbon emissions associated with an organization's supply chain. More specifically, it means engaging with your suppliers to cut carbon emissions together to reduce your overall climate impact.
When thinking about supply chain carbon emissions, we have to look past the Greenhouse Gas Protocol’s Scopes 1 and 2 emissions. These emissions are produced either directly by a company/organization or indirectly through the purchase of energy.
We want to look at Scope 3 emissions, the ones related to your supply chain. These emissions focus on the upstream and downstream value chain. Although Scope 1 and 2 emissions are relatively ‘easy’ to decarbonize since your organization owns these activities, Scope 3 relies on the activity of your suppliers which may be harder to track down and manage.
Although there is an added level of complexity when accounting for the emissions associated with suppliers in your supply chain, this is often the biggest category of emissions and is a necessary step to accurately and completely decarbonize your supply chain.
We’ve broken down this complex process into four digestible steps in the guide below to help your organization start the supply chain decarbonization journey.
Four steps to decarbonizing your supply chain
1. Understand your organization’s supply chain and carbon footprint
Identifying and understanding your organization’s supply chain and carbon footprint are the most crucial steps to this process - without a starting point, it’s impossible to set realistic targets and communicate your needs and goals to stakeholders and suppliers. Quantify your organization’s carbon footprint internally or externally with a carbon consultant and determine your emissions by scope. Identify your suppliers and recognize the emissions data that is missing from your carbon footprint if specific supplier data is not yet available.
2. Set a realistic target
Utilizing your carbon footprint that you quantified in the previous step, set realistic targets for both your organization’s and your suppliers emissions. Many organizations are looking to the framework set forth by Science Based Targets to assist in the creation of these targets as well as publicly commit to their carbon reduction goals. Currently, Science Based Targets only provides mandatory guidance and action based on an organization’s Scope 1 and 2 emissions. As your goal is the decarbonization of your supply chain, ensure that your targets include Scope 3 emissions as well as those that account for your supply chain’s emissions.
3. Engage & incentive suppliers
The only way supply chain decarbonization will work is if your suppliers are engaged in the process throughout and understand why it’s important to your organization and how it can be mutually beneficial to them as well. It’s important that this process is looked at as a partnership as this could not be achieved without supplier engagement and participation. Create a program that incentivizes suppliers to participate in - that could mean hiring a carbon consulting firm, like RyeStrategy, who specialize in working with suppliers, giving participants recognition of their carbon reduction efforts. A structured program as such will show your suppliers that this is a partnership and collaboration to truly advocate for climate action and carbon reduction.
4. Advocate for future change and reductions
The final and ongoing step in the decarbonization process is to continue to advocate for change and reductions in terms of climate action. Quantifying and offsetting previous emissions is incredibly important for immediate climate action and results. The next step is to continue to work towards reducing the amount of emissions that your organization and its suppliers release into the atmosphere for every day operations. When working with RyeStrategy, you’ll receive targeted mitigation strategies that will assist in the reduction of carbon emissions on an ongoing basis to reduce your carbon footprint and the amount of offsets you’ll need to purchase in the future to reach carbon neutrality.
Interested in learning more about how RyeStrategy can help your organization decarbonize its supply chain? Reach out to us at info@ryestrategy.com!
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About RyeStrategy
Based in Seattle, RyeStrategy is a CDP-accredited, mission-oriented company specialized in carbon accounting, mitigation coaching, and climate disclosure solutions for organizations at any point in their sustainability journey. Learn how RyeStrategy helped Salesforce, Ideascale, and Wazoku achieve their sustainability goals.
From exhaustive carbon footprinting and mitigation coaching, to setting science-based targets and reporting climate data to CDP, SBTi or custom reporting platforms, RyeStrategy acts as a hands-on extension of the team, custom-tailoring services to fulfill climate disclosure requirements easily and accurately.
Meet with a sustainability specialist to learn more about RyeStrategy solutions.
