State of Supply Chain Sustainability 2022
SCS Disclosures: A Steeper Summit
Our survey also asks respondents about their
firms' practices for disclosing supply chain
sustainability information. Arranged again as
a staircase, we see that firms most commonly
communicate their sustainability efforts
through their own websites, press releases,
and corporate CSR reports. These are all, of
course, channels of in-house messaging. That
is, the company itself both collects the data
and reports it. Less often applied are the use of
reporting organizations and third-party case
studies. These peak stairs require partnerships
with specialists and watchdog groups, often
requiring added cost and external collaboration.
Although they appear less frequently, these
kinds of partnerships also represent the most
meaningful increase year over year after falling
from 2019 to 2020.
In addition to illuminating a possible next step
in one's supply chain sustainability journey, the
staircases of practice and disclosure also point
towards boundary crossing partnerships as a next
frontier in supply chain sustainability. The higher
steps are ones that come with more difficult or
unpalatable requirements like collaboration
with outside entities, and perhaps even sharing
sensitive information with those external
collaborators and stakeholders. This, however, is
not always easy; through our executive interviews,
we learned that this is a real barrier to improving
supply chain sustainability. One respondent from
the warehousing and logistics sector reflected
on this challenge: "The collaboration has to be both
inside your company and outside, across industry, and
that's really hard to do, particularly because you have
to have a really good culture to do that."
Does your firm disclose information about its supply chain
sustainability practices using each of the following channels?
Third-party case study
Reporting organization
60%
65%
Press release
83%
Company sustainability & CSR report
Website
84%
91%
Figure 14: "Staircase" of SCS disclosures (n = 382)
Increasing Involvement Across Business Functions
We also asked survey respondents about
their level of engagement with supply chain
sustainability initiatives. Respondents could
report themselves as decision-makers, directly
engaged, indirectly engaged, or not at all engaged
with supply chain sustainability. In every year
since 2019, the respondents reported most
commonly that they were indirectly engaged.
With the current survey, however, we saw an
increase in responses from decision-makers
and those directly engaged with SCS initiatives.
We also saw a slight decrease in those not
involved at all over the three years.
The increase in all levels of engagement—
especially the large and growing representation
of direct engagement-indicate sustainability
awareness and agency spreading throughout
firms, beyond the purview of a single
"sustainability czar", and into day-to-day
operations.
Supply chains are so complex that no one can tackle
sustainability alone. Collaborating with the right
partners who have the right technology is essential.
-Rachel Schwalbach
Vice President for
Environmental, Social, & Governance, C.H. Robinson
What best describes your engagement with your firm's
sustainability efforts in the supply chain?
9% 10%
31% 29%
16%
32%
None
Decision-
maker
15% 16%
36% 32%
40% 44%
36%
Directly
Indirectly
21% 18% 15%
2019 2020 2021
Comparison by firm size
6% 7%
20% 18%
13% 13%
11%
38%
26% 37% 37%
36%
29%
44%
32%
23%
46% 41% 41%
21%
34% 40% 36%
33%
18% 14% 13% 15% 15% 16% 16% 13%
0-19
5,000-9,999
1,000-4,999
500-999
100-499
20-99
50,000 or more
10,000-49,999
Figure 15: Respondents by level of engagement with their firms' SCS
efforts (n = 1,522)
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