According to procurementmag.com, EcoVadis found that 80% of companies rated by the sustainability assessment platform have no documented process for identifying or managing sustainability risks within their supply chains.
Widespread Gaps in ESG Data and Accountability
The findings come from the latest EcoVadis Sustainability Ratings Index, which draws on nearly 200,000 scorecards compiled from more than 100,000 companies globally between 2021 and 2025. Among those assessed, 73% lack Scope 3 upstream emissions reporting, while 77% have no downstream tracking capability. Only 2% maintain an external grievance mechanism accessible to workers deeper in the supply chain — a critical safeguard for human rights violations.
Further revealing a transparency bottleneck, fewer than 1% of rated companies report granular, decision-grade sustainability data to buyer organizations. This systemic data scarcity undermines both regulatory compliance and operational due diligence, particularly as mandatory ESG disclosure regimes like the EU’s Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD) take effect.
Procurement Practices Remain Paper-Based and Fragmented
Despite growing regulatory pressure, verification practices remain rudimentary. 42% of companies still rely solely on unverified supplier questionnaires, and only 46% require suppliers to sign a formal sustainability code of conduct. On-site audits — long considered a gold standard for validation — are conducted by just 20% of firms, a figure that has remained stagnant for four years.
This inertia persists even as corporate buyers accelerate technology adoption: 68% have deployed AI tools in sustainable procurement programs, with carbon data validation cited as the top application by 62% of those users. Yet the supplier base is largely unequipped to support these systems — 30% provide no carbon data at all, and 26% submit only aggregated estimates, not activity-level disclosures.
AI Deployment Exposes Supplier Data Readiness Gap
Sylvain Guyoton, Chief Rating Officer at EcoVadis, emphasized that technical sophistication alone cannot resolve foundational data deficits. “Organisations have built sophisticated tools to analyse supplier sustainability data,” he said. “The suppliers either don’t have that data or can’t report it in a form the tools can use.”
“Companies willing to treat supplier engagement as an ongoing process, rather than a one-time compliance exercise, close the distance between what they intend and what they can actually verify.” — Sylvain Guyoton, Chief Rating Officer at EcoVadis
Guyoton underscored that measurement gaps reside not in software but in the supply base itself — requiring sustained engagement through structured assessments, scored performance metrics, and documented follow-up actions. This aligns with broader industry trends: The Boston Consulting Group found that 44% of companies are deploying AI in supply chain management — a higher adoption rate than in finance, HR, or procurement functions.
Strategic Implications for Supply Chain Professionals
For procurement and sustainability practitioners, the data signals a clear operational imperative: digitizing internal workflows is insufficient without parallel capacity-building across tiers of suppliers. The 80% gap in documented risk processes means most firms lack standardized protocols for escalation, remediation timelines, or third-party verification triggers — all essential under emerging CSDDD and SEC climate disclosure rules.
Practitioners must shift from static, point-in-time assessments to dynamic, continuous monitoring — integrating tier-2 and tier-3 data where feasible, prioritizing high-risk categories (e.g., mining, apparel, electronics), and co-developing reporting templates with key suppliers. Without such alignment, AI-driven sustainability programs risk generating false confidence rather than verifiable impact.
Source: procurementmag.com
Compiled from international media by the SCI.AI editorial team.
