Today, we’re launching Watershed Supply Chain, the first solution dedicated to helping businesses reduce carbon emissions at scale across their supply chain. Our goal is to make measuring, understanding, and reducing emissions across businesses’ supply chains fast, easy, and effective.
For most companies, emissions from supplier and vendor activities make up a significant share of Scope 3 emissions, which often account for 80% or more of a company’s total carbon footprint. This means that any company with a climate target—whether Net Zero, carbon neutral, or science-based—must address vendor emissions to achieve it.
But until now, understanding and reducing supplier emissions has been very challenging. Assessing a supplier’s carbon footprint was manual and time-consuming, with emails across oceans, mismatched datasets, and limited visibility into what, if anything, a supplier was doing to reduce emissions. Getting suppliers to make meaningful reductions required entire dedicated teams to work directly with suppliers on target-setting and reduction strategies.
Today, we’re changing the game on Scope 3 emissions by giving companies clarity into supply chain emissions, streamlining supplier engagement, and accelerating real carbon reduction—with the end goal of accelerating our path to a zero carbon economy.
An inflection point
It’s a critical time for companies to take action on supplier emissions. The International Sustainability Standards Board (ISSB)—set to become the new global standard—has voted unanimously to require company disclosures on Scope 1, Scope 2 and Scope 3 emissions as part of its new standards. As of last year, 96% of companies with Science Based Targets Initiative (SBTi) targets had reduction targets for Scope 3 emissions. And investors, stakeholders, customers and employees are increasingly looking to companies to make meaningful steps toward decarbonization.
Within Scope 3, supplier activities are one of the largest emissions sources—and one of the hardest to measure and reduce. Industry estimates fall short of providing a clear picture of supplier emissions, and gathering reliable data from suppliers is a time-consuming, manual process. Taking action on those insights is even more difficult, since it requires companies to have both the resources and the influence to help their vendors identify opportunities for reductions and take meaningful action. Even if measurement and collaborative goal-setting are successful, tracking supplier progress can introduce the same manual challenges.
With Watershed Supply Chain, we’re taking the manual, time-intensive work out of engaging with suppliers—and helping companies accelerate the path to meaningful carbon reduction.
Decarbonize your supply chain at scale
Watershed Supply Chain does the heavy lifting of evaluating, prioritizing, and engaging with suppliers and vendors, streamlining and accelerating supply chain emissions reduction. We work with your existing teams and tools, with flexible software to help you scale quickly.
"Watershed Supply Chain helps us to prioritize climate action in our supply chain, enabling us to focus on our most material suppliers. Watershed provides deep climate education and actionable reduction paths for our partners to collaborate in achieving Klarna's highest level sustainability goals." – Salah Said, Head of Sustainability at Klarna
Get a clear picture of supplier emissions
Watershed Supply Chain works with your vendors to measure and analyze their emissions using supplier-specific, granular data–beyond generic estimates. In just days, you’ll get a high-fidelity carbon footprint for your supply chain. Watershed Supply Chain delivers deep insights into supplier and vendor emissions, reduction targets and commitments, and how they compare to industry norms. We’ll help your suppliers navigate the process by meeting them where they are—whether they’ve already started measuring emissions or are brand new to carbon footprinting.
Focus on the suppliers that matter
Next, we help you focus your effort by identifying the best opportunities for reducing supplier emissions—whether it’s a few big emitters, a subset of vendors where your business has the greatest leverage, or suppliers who are early in their climate journey and need extra support. This might mean focusing on a handful of top emitters within your supply chain, or scaling your engagement across many vendors; either way, we’ll help ensure you spend time where you can have the greatest impact.
Streamline supplier engagement
Throughout the supplier engagement process, Watershed streamlines communication, measurement, and reduction strategies with each vendor—saving sustainability leaders valuable time while creating user-friendly experiences for every supplier. Our user-friendly software allows us to engage suppliers at scale, with customizable experiences and easy-to-use vendor portals.
Track suppliers' decarbonization progress
With Watershed Supply Chain, you can see your suppliers’ goals and reduction initiatives, the progress they’re making, and emissions projections–in a single dashboard. We build in recommended actions when suppliers are falling behind. This helps your sourcing and procurement teams get a complete picture, so you can make purchasing, renewal, and spend decisions based on the real actions your suppliers are making.
“Watershed Supply Chain will provide us with a high level of carbon data fidelity, allowing us to make clear and informed decisions around how we action comprehensive decarbonization in lockstep with our suppliers to mutually enable emissions reductions across our supply chain." – Ben Murphy, Vice President, Sustainability at Boom Supersonic
Watershed helps leading companies like Walmart, Airbnb, and Block measure, report, and act on their emissions to drive decarbonization at scale. Learn more about Watershed Supply Chain.
