Don’t be fooled by climate change complacency

Spring has come early in Ticino, on the border of Switzerland and Italy, on the slopes overlooking Lake Lugarno, and has resulted in a particularly heavy spaghetti crop. The last few weeks of March have been a worrying time for pasta makers. There is always the possibility of a late frost which, although it does not completely destroy the crop, has an impact on the taste, making it difficult to achieve top prices in world markets.

Another reason for bumper cultivation lies in the virtual disappearance of the spaghetti bug, a tiny creature that has decimated crops in the past. Of course, the spaghetti crop in Switzerland is nowhere near the size of the Italian industry and the vast spaghetti plantations in the Po Valley, but an inadequate or failed crop can significantly affect the prices paid on the world market based on supply and demand.

Yes, it’s April 1st and this story is based on another story that first appeared on April Fool’s Day in 1957 on the BBC news program Panorama (see hereworth watching).

It’s a stark reminder that sometimes climate change hysteria plays tricks on us all. But the impact of climate change on the farming world and the entire global supply chain cannot be ignored.

Here are some alarming examples of climate change from 2023 that are no joke:

• When a bomb cyclone hit California in early 2023, extreme flooding (after years of drought) affected imports, exports, transportation, and destroyed crops across the state.
• In June, a major highways collapsed in Pennsylvania resulting in logistics challenges up and down the US East Coast
• On July, India has announced an export ban on non-basmati white rice due to rising prices and fear of shortages due to El Nino disturbances.
• The Lack of Sriracha hot spring she was “hot” on social media. This was due to poor jalapeno crops in Mexico, which relies on water from the depleted Colorado River.
• Water level of the Panama Canal were also very low, endangering an estimated 40% of consumer goods transported between North Asia and the US East Coast.
• In October you could read about one lack of sugar due to droughts in India, and floods in Brazil! This was exacerbated by the poor sugar beet harvest in Europe.

Be part of the solution

It is imperative that companies make sustainability central to their overall business strategy. To begin the process, business leaders must examine all of their network functions and identify sustainability weaknesses inside and outside their organization.

For example, supply chains are a major contributor to waste and carbon emissions and are therefore an important area of ​​opportunity for improvement. Creating measurable goals to improve a company’s supply chain (eg, eliminating single-use plastics within the next 18 months or becoming carbon neutral by 2030), can restore the trust of customers, investors, employees and other stakeholders that the organization is taking steps to become more sustainable.

But it’s one thing to set goals and another to achieve them. Supply chain leaders must ensure they account for and manage climate-related emissions in all parts of their supply chain (Scope 1,2 and 3), which includes suppliers, contract manufacturers, logistics service providers and other trading partners .

This is no small feat – a lack of visibility across a company’s supply chain is often why business leaders struggle to manage the wholecarbon footprintof the products. By using technology to provide the visibility they need to see across their supply chain, business leaders can then take action to reduce their company’s end-to-end carbon footprint.

To learn more about how to prepare your business to enable a risk-resilient and sustainable supply chain, download the recentOxford Economics Research.