How many suppliers should I engage?

Start with your highest-impact suppliers. Typically, 10–20% of suppliers account for 80% of supply chain emissions. Prioritise by spend, emissions intensity, or strategic importance. Gradually expand the programme as resources allow. Quality engagement with a few key suppliers is more effective than superficial requests to hundreds.

What if my suppliers refuse to provide emissions data?

Use spend-based estimates as a fallback and communicate the trajectory towards supplier-specific data. Many suppliers are unfamiliar with carbon reporting and need support rather than pressure. Provide resources, toolkits, or training. Over time, integrate carbon data provision into contract requirements and supplier evaluations.

Supplier Engagement

Supplier engagement is the process of working with suppliers to collect emissions data, set reduction targets, and implement decarbonisation measures across the supply chain.

What is Supplier Engagement?

For most organisations, Scope 3 emissions — particularly from purchased goods and services — represent the largest portion of their total footprint. Reducing these emissions requires engaging with suppliers to understand their carbon performance, encourage measurement and disclosure, and collaborate on reduction initiatives.

Supplier engagement strategies range from basic data requests (asking suppliers to report their emissions) to active collaboration (joint investment in low-carbon technologies, shared targets, preferred supplier status for lower-carbon options). The CDP Supply Chain Programme is the most widely used platform for collecting emissions data from suppliers at scale.

Effective supplier engagement follows a tiered approach: identify and prioritise high-impact suppliers (typically the top 20% by spend or emissions), request data and set expectations, provide support and resources for measurement, set targets and track progress, and integrate carbon performance into procurement decisions.

Practical Examples

A retailer writes to its top 100 suppliers requesting CDP disclosure, and includes carbon performance as a criterion in its annual supplier scorecard.

A manufacturer provides training and tools to help its SME suppliers measure their carbon footprint for the first time, improving the quality of its Scope 3 data.

A construction company sets a requirement that all new concrete suppliers must provide product carbon footprint data and demonstrate a year-on-year reduction trajectory.

How Climatise Helps

Climatise provides supplier data collection workflows and Scope 3 analytics that identify your highest-impact suppliers, enabling targeted engagement strategies that drive real supply chain emission reductions.

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