Sustainable supply chain management and partner engagement to manage climate change information

Climate change poses significant new risks and challenges for businesses and their supply chains. Additionally, in many sectors scope 3 indirect greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions resulting from the sourcing and distribution of goods and services are larger than firms’ own carbon footprints. Here we study how firms engage their key stakeholders in their supply chains in obtaining, processing and transferring relevant climate change related information designed to overcome information asymmetry and drive sustainable development. Grounded in organisational information processing theory (OIPT), we draw on data from the Carbon Disclosure Project’s (CDP) Climate Change Supply Chain initiative for a qualitative content analysis of a large sample of global firms. Consistent with OIPT, we find that while firms primarily engage their supply chain partners in a variety of ways to reduce information uncertainty around indirect emissions data, effectively interpreting and managing broader sustainability information equivocality becomes a growing priority. Our findings further suggest that firms engage suppliers, customers and other supply chain partners through basic, transactional and collaborative types of engagement. We contribute to literatures on inter-organisational information processing and sustainable supply chain management by providing a more detailed understanding of how firms engage supply chain partners in the context of climate change.