Climate Change, Sustainability in Value Chains and History

Being a supply chain guy who sometimes feels like I've been around for centuries, it's actually been only decades. None the less, the world is clearly changing and Sustainability is now right up there with Supply Chain Management as the new thing!

Let me say right off, I fully believe all business needs to aim at being sustainable. And/But, that means different things to different people for a host of various reasons. Part of the challenge is the way we approach being sustainable. What are the motives? Often financial.

Reported by Forbes magazine, "A study by Harvard Business School?found that companies that focused on sustainability outperformed their peers in terms of stock price and profitability. Its hard to argue with success! And yet, we find varied and mixed signals from business leaders about what this means to them and how they will address it. Reported by Columbia Law School, "These three firms are in effect playing regulators of ESG in our capital markets and demonstrating their willingness to take action at annual meetings or through special shareholder votes."

At the end of the day, what are we concerned about? Carbon Emissions, GHG, Greenhouse gases are increasing. Without getting into why that might be changing, lets review the history of the planet for some insights.

Reported by Earth.org , https://earth.org/data_visualization/a-brief-history-of-co2/ we can gain important understanding about how much CO2 we have, long before, recently before, (past few decades), now, and projected. Check out these graphs.

CO2 levels from a long history. Notice the blip at the year 2000 and then the various projections, all going the wrong way. Moving higher by 2 degrees is similar to 100 million years ago before the ice age and the planet had more liquid water and Miami Florida did not yet have beaches.

Next, lets review temps over time. Admittedly a tough science but good enough for our needs, here we see that although not a lot of change in temps for last 1,000 years, we see a distinctive increase the recent time. It takes only 2 degree rise to put us into a danger zone again. Estimates say it also takes maybe 50 years for the effect to manifest after the change is in place. We're there now.

Let's zoom in on the last 800,000 years to get a better view of recent history. It seems the CO2 levels have made a clear shift away from past patterns, breaking out of the "normal" range of last 800k years. Which is really what this is all about.

To put this into perspective, all the work we do in life and in business contributes to the CO2 change. Changing the way we drive our supply chains directly impacts the outcome. GHG, greenhouse gas is measured in Scope 1, direct outputs of our supply chain processes. Scope 2 is indirectly resulting from the processes we purchase, such as electricity we use to run our factories. And then there is scope 3, indirectly resulting from our upstream and downstream supply chain activities of our partner suppliers. So, the next time you buy a cheap something from Wal-Mart, purchased from a factory in China, 8k miles away, just remember that trip your item took to get to you is adding to the CO2 of our planet.

All that to say, we have some work to do, starting with understanding WHAT Sustainability really is about, and WHY you should take notice, to lead your firm towards a more circular economy by rethinking your supply chain network. Linear supply chain has everything ending up in the landfill. Circular supply chain has more materials passing back into the supply chain in a circular loop. That is a benefit for Profit, Planet and People!

If you are interested in learning more about Sustainability for your value chain, you can reach out us to learn about an assessment of your supply chain or just to gain a new awareness of what to manage differently.

Bob Forshay, SupplyChainPro2Know