In this installment of EHSDA Shorts, Katie Martin, Sustainability and Innovation Director of Avetta, explains what organizations can do to be more sustainable.
This clip was taken from a webinar titled “Emerging Trends in Sustainability, Compliance, and Procurement,” as part of EHS Enviro, Social, & Governance Week. The full session is available for FREE on-demand here.
This webinar was sponsored by Avetta.
Transcript (edited for clarity):
Question: What can organizations do to be more sustainable?
Martin: The first thing we chatted about, and of course with the framework we just spoke about to decarbonization, is [to] understand what the current state of reality is for your supply chain. You need to map that supply chain according to risk. You typically probably already have some kind of risk matrices and risk management program. That’s about if they’re on site, if they’re from a certain industry they’re performing a certain type of service. What needs to happen is that risk may need to be updated and expanded to include sustainability components as well, because your on-site high spend are likely going to fall under a risk component in sustainability. But there’s going to be some smaller off-site folks that you want to capture in there and make sure that they’re not slipping through as a social risk or an environmental risk. This is also true for other expanded risks like cybersecurity and things.
I think one of the great cyber breaches, for example, happened at Target. They actually had a really robust risk management program but they had a sub of a sub that subbed out to an HVAC vendor that didn’t have the appropriate compliance in place and that created the breach that eventually brought down the house of cards. That’s why it’s good to have one a revamped look of what does risk look like in this modern landscape, including these elements like sustainability and then how are we getting to the tier two and tier three folks where able. That’s something that we’ve worked hard to build into our system as well is really getting that full supply chain map and understanding those risks on the tier one, tier two, and tier three level by geography, type of service, etc.
When you have a better understanding of the broader array of risk and where you need to enhance due diligence processes or incorporate a certain segment of your suppliers into a sustainability due diligence process. That’s when you have to kind of build out what that looks like. You may already have an existing vendor who is providing risk management services to you that likely has a sustainability and ESG component that you can spin up or add on to your existing piece. You may be trying to do this in-house and finding it’s really challenging to scale this with Excel spreadsheets or anything connected to your ERP and get supplier response. So you want to think about what are the critical questions that we need to incorporate or ask if you don’t have a dedicated headcount to sustainability management in your organization. Again, that’s where relying on third-party services comes into play, they likely have SMEs or have already built out critical content to support you in this way.