The COVID-19 pandemic drew attention to how central supply chains are to the global economy. It also exposed the human rights abuses that can occur up and down supply chains before goods arrive in our hands.
By contrast, the environmental impacts of supply chains and the disproportionate burdens they place on the world’s most vulnerable people have been overshadowed in public debate.
Some observers assert these impacts rise to the level of environmental injustice – situations in which supply chains actively harm people, communities and the environment. They argue that the companies managing supply chains should be held responsible for reversing these effects.
When supply chains move beyond traditional markers of performance — efficiency, flexibility and responsiveness — to consider the benefits and harms of their activities, they can become environmentally just. Such supply chains distribute environmental benefits (such as clean air, water or access to land) more fairly while ensuring all stakeholders are included in decision-making.
In our recent research study, my colleagues and I argue that environmental justice should be treated as a core concept of sustainable supply chain management. We identify three pathways that offer practical entry points for businesses and other organizations seeking to address environmental injustice within supply chains.
Expanding due diligence
The first pathway involves incorporating environmental justice into human rights due diligence, the process businesses use to identify and address harms. Due diligence includes identifying and assessing potential harms, taking action, monitoring outcomes and being transparent about how harms are addressed.
While some businesses typically focus on their human rights impacts, they can go further. Environmental justice is closely linked to violence against environmental rights defenders, such as Indigenous land defenders or community activists, who face disproportionate environmental harms and risks and organize to resist them.
Businesses should therefore make public commitments to respect environmental rights defenders, disclose how they assess and act on those commitments, and implement mechanisms for redress if violations occur.
(AP Photo/Andre Penner)
At the global level, the United Nations Environment Programme has recently developed guidelines for conducting human rights due diligence with an environmental perspective to aid businesses in these efforts.
In Europe, the European Union’s Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive now requires companies to conduct human rights and environmental due diligence across their operations and supply chains. While due diligence has been seen as a way to target international human rights, its effectiveness still relies on how well it’s implemented across different types of supply chains.
Some companies have begun to move in this direction. Coca-Cola, for example, has adopted a zero-tolerance policy on traditional and Indigenous land grabs — a major driver of environmental injustice — within their supply chains, with third-party monitoring.
Similarly, Shell, Kellogg’s and Rio Tinto have all incorporated respect for environmental rights defenders in their human rights policies. Canadian firms, too, have faced growing pressure to adopt similar approaches, though such measures are not yet mandatory.
Building resilient supply chains
The second approach is to incorporate resilience thinking into supply chain strategies to restore and regenerate the communities and environments damaged by supply chain activities.
Resilience thinking suggests that small-scale changes can lead to larger-scale transformations. This perspective is particularly important in the context of climate change.
Greenhouse gas emissions generated along supply chains can remain in the atmosphere for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. Simply reducing emissions is not enough. To achieve climate justice, carbon dioxide must be removed from the atmosphere.
Resilience-focused supply chains can contribute by integrating technologies that remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere into their operations, such as capturing carbon and storing it within soil or carbonate minerals like limestone in oceans.
(AP Photo/Michael Probst)
Firms in industrialized nations, which are responsible for a disproportionate share of emissions, should be the first to implement these strategies in their supply chains and to finance their adoption in poorer countries.
Such measures can help reduce environmental harms, more equitably distribute environmental benefits and increase the resilience of people and the environments they depend on.
Working with affected communities
The third pathway is to work directly with stakeholders to build fairer supply chains. Environmental harm is rarely caused by just one step in a supply chain, so fixing it requires people working together.
Collaborative initiatives can help by bringing together businesses (sometimes competitors), community representatives, policymakers and civil society organizations.
These collaborations pool resources to tackle issues like human rights abuses, deforestation, climate change and biodiversity loss. However, they are only effective if they place community and environmental concerns ahead of short-term business interests and embrace diverse forms of knowledge, as some mining companies in Australia have begun to do.
It’s only when the communities affected by environmental injustice participate in redress that environmentally just supply chains can have lasting, positive effects.
From sustainability to justice
Business responses to the environmental crisis will remain limited until environmental justice is fully incorporated into supply chain sustainability strategies.
Without this shift, efforts to improve sustainability risk overlooking how environmental harms and benefits are unevenly distributed across communities.
To meaningfully transform supply chains into mechanisms of lasting environmental justice, managers must adopt these three pathways.
When those responsible for the greatest harms to the world’s most vulnerable communities take meaningful action to address them, then they can start to reshape communities, businesses and the world for the better.
Marina Dantas de Figueiredo, academic co-ordinator at CESAR School, co-authored this article.
