Mitigating Supply Chain Risk is Getting Easier

As companies are being held accountable for supply chain transparency, there are resources available to find this type of data. According to Sissel Waage of GreenBiz, issues such as deforestation, water risk and biodiversity loss can be found via Big Data.

Corporate decision-makers can access data and maps on:

• Water risk around the world,  from tools such as WRI’s Aqueduct and the WWF’s Water Risk Filter, other tools listed by the CEO Water Mandate, as well as an ever-growing set of tailored or proprietary tools such as from the Danish Hydrological Institute,EcoMetrix Solutions Group and Sensonomic 
• Financial valuation of water risk, such as TruCost’s Water Risk Monetizer
• Global deforestation, with the help of WRI’s Global Forest Watch
• Biodiversity loss and habitat fragmentation, with the CI-IUCN-UNEP-BirdLife International Integrated Biodiversity Assessment Tool (IBAT for Business) or Oxford University’s Local Ecological Footprinting Tool
• Numerous other environmental issues through maps and data from the U.N.’s World Conservation Monitoring Center, as well as additional tools such as the Stanford University-TNC- WWF-University of Minnesota Natural Capital Project, the Earth Genome and others laid out in a recent BSR report

Waage points out that in this new age of data, supply chain managers will be asked these high level questions:

1. Are corporate decisions and supply chains investing in business solutions that offer "benefit multipliers" for companies, communities and natural systems?
2. Or are decisions undercutting the very systems upon which we all rely and introducing"ecosystem malfunction risk" into corporate risk management and mitigation portfolios?

The author makes the point that given all of these resources there is no longer a reason to be uniformed about these issues.

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