FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

October 09, 2025

C2ES Paper Aims to Strengthen Corporate Supply Chain’s Climate Resilience

Primer Identifies Critical Areas That Require Collaboration Between Corporate Supply Chain Managers and Climate Risk Assessors

WASHINGTON—Driven by climate change, the escalating frequency and severity of extreme weather events have become a growing threat to global commodity supply chains and trade infrastructure, ranging from the Los Angeles wildfires to recent droughts at the Panama Canal to extreme rain and flooding at the Port of Vancouver. Yet, many leading businesses still separate their logistics and supply chain managers from their climate risk assessors, exposing them to greater risks and damages. To bridge that gap, the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions (C2ES) published a paper outlining how supply chain and climate risk teams can collaborate to improve a company’s climate risk management.

“Climate risk is still a new concept in supply chain management, as evidenced by the lack of resilience tools that incorporate long-term climate assessments,” said Sadie Frank, author of Assessing the Landscape of Climate Risk and Supply Chain Resilience: A Primer for Corporate Leaders and Climate Risk Professionals.  “Similarly, many corporate climate risk disclosures focus only on asset-level risks, overlooking the critical logistics and trade networks that support global supply chains. This primer is designed to close that gap, helping climate risk and supply chain practitioners learn from each other’s experiences and deep knowledge.”

In the paper, C2ES identifies several critical areas where supply chain risk and climate risk professionals can collaborate and learn from each other:

• Cross-disciplinary learning: Supply-chain teams can leverage climate science’s forward-looking hazard models, while climate risk professionals can adopt supply-chain disciplines like visibility, flexibility, and control to strengthen operational resilience.
• Bridging data and analysis gaps: Joint pilot projects and mixed qualitative–quantitative approaches (e.g., scenario analysis using alternative data) can help overcome fragmented supply-chain and climate datasets and improve confidence in decision-making.
• Developing decision-useful KPIs and metrics: Co-creating measurable indicators that capture both climate exposure and supply-chain performance (e.g., Time to Survive/Recover, business continuity KPIs) will give companies actionable benchmarks for climate-driven disruptions.
• Aligning governance and organizational structure: Identifying where climate and supply-chain risk functions should sit—whether in Enterprise Risk Management, finance, or compliance—can embed integrated resilience into core business processes.
• Scaling collaborative research and stakeholder dialogues: Structured exchanges among business leaders, climate scientists, and supply-chain practitioners can accelerate the creation of shared frameworks and next-generation resilience toolkits.

In the future, C2ES will continue to focus on supply chains as a critical force for business resilience.

For more information on integrating climate resilience into corporate business strategies, visit https://www.c2es.org/building-climate-resilience/advancing-business-leadership-on-climate-resilience/ .

To discuss this paper and its recommendations contact Allison Dennis at press@c2es.org 

The Center for Climate and Energy Solutions (C2ES) is an independent, nonpartisan, nonprofit organization working to secure a safe and stable climate by accelerating the global transition to net-zero greenhouse gas emissions and a thriving, just, and resilient economy.