Several times in the last couple of weeks I had conversations along the lines of “how on earth are we ever going to decarbonise our supply chain?” This frustration comes from the assumption that the businesses that supply your organisation are only going to come under pressure to decarbonise from you, but that’s far from the case.

Let’s look at an individual, me. My carbon footprint has fallen over the last two decades as I’ve made active choices: I stopped commuting, eventually sold my car, decreased my meat consumption, switched from CFL to LED lighting and cut flying. But a huge chunk of the remaining carbon has evaporated without me lifting a finger – because the amount of carbon emitted for every kWh of electricity I consume has fallen by about two thirds.

For an organisation, that grid electricity decarbonisation will reduce the carbon footprint of every tier of the supply chain, a ripple of benefits. What’s more, the trend is likely to accelerate as the shift to electrification intensifies alongside further decarbonisation (if you have a big ‘but’ in your mind, check out my podcast episode “Is the grid ready for Net Zero?“), and regulations such as CBAM start to bite.

This is NOT an argument for ‘do nothing’, in fact one of my big bug bears is organisations boasting about decarbonisation effectively done by somebody else. But much of your supply chain, particularly in services, will do a large amount of decarbonisation off their own bat.

On the ‘difficult’ carbon, you have two main strategies:
1. Put pressure on your existing suppliers to decarbonise. Don’t forget, they won’t just be hearing from you, but from their other customers, their employees and the regulators.
2. Change your supply chain. Either find a supplier who will help cut your footprint by cutting their footprint, or redesign your operations, product/service and/or your business model to eliminate more intransigent carbon. Again, you are not alone – others will be searching for similar solutions, so whether you jump first or they do, everybody wins.

Change is usually slow until it suddenly accelerates – the classic S-curve of progress. Think of the most revolutionary product of the last 20 years – the iPhone. All the technologies in the iPhone were available for decades beforehand, but a potent mixture of each of them maturing to the necessary level and the Steve Jobs/Jonny Ive vision of a seamless user interface created a technological  explosion. I foresee the same happening in decarbonisation as innovation, economies of scale and integration combine to hit a whole series of tipping points.

So my point here is, don’t look at your Scope 3 emissions and weep. Do what you can, help others do similar and watch for shifts that you can take advantage of. Everybody is in the same boat and everybody has an oar in front of them. It might take time for everybody to pick up their oar and start rowing efficiently, but when they do, that’s when the boat starts surging in the right direction. Pick up your oar.