Reduce Value Chain Emissions
Manage Key Issues: Retail
Retailers have complex value chains with networks across sectors and geographies. Achieving your company’s sustainability goals will require working with your suppliers to reduce their emissions from key sources like agriculture, transport and manufacturing.
The common sources of Scope 3 emissions for retail companies include energy use in your suppliers’ facilities, and emissions from upstream and downstream transport and distribution. Other hotspots of value chain emissions are often supplier use of refrigerants and industrial gases, and farming practices that release methane.
For retailers with food and agriculture supply chains, methane may represent one of the largest opportunities for emissions reductions. The complex challenge of tackling agricultural emissions will require innovation and collaboration between all parties, including retail companies. Encouraging your suppliers to reduce methane emissions and invest in solutions like energy efficiency measures and renewable energy can improve the resilience of your value chain to climate transition risks. It can also lower costs and signal your demand for low- and zero-emission goods and services, which will demonstrate climate leadership.
The following action steps provide more insight on managing the key issues for retail companies related to emissions in your value chain.
