Supply Chain Superintelligence: November 2024

Welcome back! This month, we’ll look at three pivotal themes with a huge impact on global supply chains:

1. The consequences of the EUDR postponement following the November 14 vote.
2. Natural disasters: Super Typhoon Yagi and the Valencia flooding.
3. Children’s rights under the ESRS framework.?

Read on for expert insight and strategies to prepare your business for the challenges ahead.

The EUDR Delay

A Critical Setback for Forest Protection

By Theresa Eberhardt

On November 14, the European Parliament voted to delay and amend the European Union Deforestation Regulation (EUDR), designed to prevent deforestation-linked products from entering EU markets. Initially adopted in December 2022 under the European Green Deal, the EUDR was meant to be a key pillar of Europe’s climate strategy. This decision weakens the regulation’s impact, slowing progress and undermining years of work towards sustainable supply chains.

The delay is a reminder that compliance isn’t just about meeting deadlines—it’s about proactive solutions built with foresight. Prewave anticipated the complexities of EUDR compliance, including the newly introduced ‘no-risk’ flexibility, and built our solution to address each step. With this foresight, our clients can move forward with confidence, prepared for any regulatory scenario.

With the extension of the EUDR deadline, businesses now have a crucial opportunity to develop a compliance strategy that prioritises resilience over reaction. Prewave’s advanced solution simplifies the steps to EUDR compliance, helping companies meet requirements while establishing a sustainable compliance framework. This window presents an opportunity to choose a partner who can support both immediate needs and long-term goals— Prewave is here to make that journey straightforward and sustainable.

The push for delay came from several EU countries, including Austria, the Czech Republic, Finland, Italy, and Sweden, which argued there wasn’t enough preparation time for businesses. Environmental groups now warn that this delay risks further deforestation, accelerating climate change and ecosystem collapse.

By prioritising business concerns over environmental action, the EU risks opening the door to more deforestation. This compromises biodiversity, threatens communities dependent on these ecosystems, and weakens Europe’s climate credibility and global climate targets.

This postponement is not a free pass. Businesses must continue to assess and mitigate supply chain impacts. Adopting sustainable practices now will future-proof businesses against regulatory changes and position them as leaders in ethical sourcing and environmental stewardship. Waiting for the law to act is a risk no forward-thinking business can afford.

A Call for Resilience

Lessons from Recent Disasters and Supply Chain Impact

By Marco Felsberger

Picture the scene: a storm alert has just been issued for an approaching weather event. Despite early warnings, hours pass before the information is acted on. By this time, water is rising, infrastructure is failing, and unprepared communities are scrambling to react.

It’s not hypothetical: during the recent floods in Valencia, delayed public alerts and fragmented communication left people and businesses vulnerable. From storms in Europe to Super Typhoon Yagi in Vietnam, natural disasters are stress-testing our resilience.

Real-world impact shows why resilient planning is essential for global supply chains: a framework behind adaptive, robust systems that don’t just survive the storm: they emerge stronger from it. While we may have limited influence over how governments respond to disasters, we can still prepare our supply chains – and our colleagues – for these events.

Storms Across Europe and Asia: When Supply Chains Are Hit

In September, Storm Boris swept through Central and Eastern Europe, causing disruption across Poland, the Czech Republic, and Austria. Flooded roads, damaged railways, and halted ports hindered the flow of goods. The storm hit key sectors, automotive, energy, and retail, posing fresh questions of supply chain resilience.

In Vietnam, Super Typhoon Yagi temporarily shut down the Hai Phong Port, a crucial node for global exports. In a world of “just in time” logistics reigns, even a few days of downtime at a port sends ripples across industries. With storms like these increasing in frequency and severity, the stakes for preparation are high.

Delayed Action: The Valencia Flood

Valencia's recent floods remind us how critical timing and coordination are during a disaster. Despite early forecasts from Spain’s meteorological agency, the first public alerts reached residents too late to prevent the impact. Critical errors included:

• Delayed Public Alerts. Over 12 hours passed from the initial weather warning to public notification, leaving residents and organisations in harm's way.
• Inefficient Emergency Systems. The emergency alert system was activated only after severe flooding had begun.
• Poor Crisis Communication. Public messaging remained inconsistent, leading to more chaos than clarity.

Delays and coordination breakdowns are costly and preventable. The faster and more organised the response, the less severe the impact. For supply chain leaders, the message is equally urgent: our systems must pivot from reactive to proactive.

9-Step Framework for Resilience in Action

What does resilience look like in a world where every delay, every missed warning, can spell disaster? This nine-step approach lends from best practices and real-world experience:

• Conduct Risk Assessments.? Locate vulnerabilities using up-to-date data on flood zones, climate impact, and infrastructure weak points.
• Engage Stakeholders. Include teams from every department – logistics, public works, communications – in resilience planning.
• Develop Early Warning Systems. Ensure alerts are real-time, comprehensive, and accessible to everyone who needs them.
• Create a Data-Sharing Protocol. Make it easy for agencies to share information, even during a crisis.
• Train and Simulate. Practise disaster response drills regularly with all relevant personnel.
• Prioritise Flexibility in Plans. Recognize that rigid protocols can hinder rapid response. Adaptability is key.
• Plan Redundancy into Supply Routes. Diversify routes and partners to avoid bottlenecks if key nodes are affected.
• Embrace Resilience. Go beyond “hardening” assets to understanding the human and system behaviours that emerge in a crisis.
• Learn and Evolve. After each event, assess what worked, what didn’t, and refine your response strategies.

This framework is a practical playbook that can reduce response time, increase coordination, and mitigate shocks to the global supply chain.

From Fragile to Antifragile: Systems That Thrive on Stress

Nassim Taleb’s idea of antifragility teaches us that resilient supply chains don’t just absorb shocks: they learn and come back stronger. Organisations must see disruptions as opportunities for growth, not just crises to endure. For example, companies that experienced severe delays from Storm Boris or Typhoon Yagi could benefit from diversifying supply routes or building redundancy into logistics planning.

Applying antifragility may mean multiple suppliers for essential components, or investing in supply chain technology to simulate and stress-test supply chain changes. With flexible, redundant pathways, companies can prepare for minor disruptions and Black Swan events.

Measuring Preparedness: The Role of Data and Analytics

Measuring what matters is essential to resilience. Supply Chain Mapping and Revenue at Risk analyses enable organisations to pinpoint critical nodes in supply chains. They can then prioritise resources and respond effectively when disaster strikes. Advanced analytics and risk modelling can assess extreme risks, making it easier to adapt to events outside the scope of traditional forecasting.

Building Resilience Together

The challenges from climate risks aren’t insurmountable. Each event is a lesson in what we can do better. By adopting resilience frameworks, and by viewing disruption as a chance to innovate, we can build supply chains that use the storms ahead as fuel for growth.

Has your organisation updated its disaster response protocols recently? Are you seeing improvements, or are new gaps emerging? Share your experience: we’re building a network of resilience that extends beyond individual companies and across entire industries.

Next Steps:

• Assess Your Supply Chain’s Weak Spots. Conduct workshops with key stakeholders to identify and prioritise risk points.
• Test Your Response Systems. Implement a simulation drill to test early warning, communication, and response procedures.
• Commit to a Culture of Continuous Learning. After each exercise or event, debrief to refine your protocols and adapt resilience plans.

Together, we can turn each disaster into a safer, more resilient future.

Building Accountability

New Standards in Sustainability Reporting and Child Rights

By Alice Gumppenberg

The European Commission’s adoption of the European Sustainability Reporting Standards (ESRS) is a big step in corporate accountability. The standards require companies to disclose environmental, social, and governance (ESG) impacts comprehensively: including the protection of children’s rights. It’s a crucial, yet often overlooked dimension, of corporate responsibility.

To help businesses meet these standards, UNICEF has released guidance that aligns reporting with child rights frameworks. These focus on three pillars:

1. Children as Vulnerable Stakeholders. How to address children as a distinct stakeholder group, considering their heightened risk in marginalised situations.
2. Double Materiality and Children’s Rights. Children’s rights are integrated into assessments, helping organisations identify risk and opportunity through a dual lens: financial and impact-driven.
3. Social Standards Reporting. Guidance covers reporting requirements related to child labour, community impacts, and safeguarding children as consumers. It also addresses critical issues such as work-life balance for parents.

Why This Matters

A recent UN report highlights that 160 million children worldwide remain trapped in child labour, often in life-threatening conditions. Half the world’s children face risks linked to the climate crisis, and one in six grow up in conflict zones. These intersecting crises amplify vulnerabilities, and need a holistic response from businesses and governments.

Moving Forward

The ESRS and UNICEF guidance aren’t just about compliance. They’re an opportunity to lead. By building children’s rights into sustainability strategies, businesses can create lasting impact that extends beyond operations, strengthening communities and ensuring an equitable future.

What steps is your organisation taking? Share your insights, as we drive change together.

We hope you enjoyed this edition of the Supply Chain Superintelligence newsletter! For more updates, follow us on LinkedIn or visit us at prewave.com.

About Prewave

Our mission has always been clear: to make the world's supply chains more transparent, resilient, and sustainable. Since our inception in 2017, Prewave has become synonymous with supply chain risk management excellence. Today, we are the world's leading end-to-end supply chain risk management platform, ensuring transparency, visibility, and compliance—all in a single platform.