Supply Chain Strategy: An innovative approach improving sustainability within the supply chain

Caroline Grey, Chief Revenue Officer and Co-Founder at Treefera, shares her thoughts with Supply Strategy on the future of resilient and sustainable supply chains.

2024 shattered temperature records, cementing its place as the hottest year in history. It’s a sobering marker of the escalating climate crisis and its cascading effects on commodity supply chains. The repercussions for businesses are stark. Danone saw 40% of its almond crop wiped out, Michelin grappled with rubber shortages, and Starbucks faced skyrocketing costs. The coffee giant paid twice as much for coffee beans sourced from regions battered by extreme weather. These disruptions expose the vulnerabilities embedded within global supply chains, where sourcing and production are increasingly shaped by the changing environment. Nowhere is this impact felt more acutely than in the first mile—the origin of commodities and carbon. It’s here that climate shifts, resource availability, and regulatory pressures converge. Without clear visibility into this crucial stage, businesses face mounting risks that threaten both profitability and long-term resilience.

Transforming supply chains to withstand climate risks is no small task. Many regions lack the infrastructure necessary to adapt, leaving significant gaps in data capture ability and commodity tracking capacity. Historically, businesses have struggled with incomplete or outdated insights into land use, sourcing, and environmental impact, making it difficult to anticipate disruptions or take corrective action. Compounding this challenge, the cost of monitoring complex supply networks has been prohibitively high, making it difficult for companies to invest in the tools necessary to bridge the gap between growth and decarbonisation. Without a shift in approach, these obstacles will only intensify, further destabilising supply chains in the years to come.

Regulation Is Driving New Expectations for Supply Chain Traceability

Alongside growing climate pressures, commodity supply chains are also navigating a rapidly evolving regulatory landscape. In the European Union, policies such as the European Deforestation Regulation (EUDR)and the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) are setting new standards for supply chain due diligence. These new pieces of legislation require businesses to demonstrate transparency and compliance in how they source materials. These frameworks demand a level of traceability that many organisations are unprepared for, particularly in nature-based commodity supply chains where sourcing occurs across fragmented, multi-tiered networks.

Elsewhere, shifting political landscapes present new uncertainties. While the EU is strengthening environmental oversight, recent moves by the United States to roll back climate commitments and signals from Argentina suggesting a potential withdrawal from international agreements reflect a growing divergence in global policy. This fragmentation creates further complexity for businesses operating across multiple jurisdictions, where compliance requirements may be inconsistent or subject to change. Faced with increasing scrutiny, companies must find ways to improve supply chain accountability, not just to meet current regulations but to stay ahead of future shifts and ensure resilience.

Advanced Monitoring and Data Analysis are Changing the Game

Visibility into the first mile has historically been a major challenge for businesses. This stage—where commodities are grown, extracted, or processed—accounts for the majority of environmental impact within supply chains, yet remains one of the most difficult to monitor. The absence of reliable data has led to a reliance on self-reported information, manual audits, and legacy tracking systems, leaving businesses exposed to inaccuracies and compliance risks. The challenge is not just collecting data but ensuring it is verifiable, timely, and actionable.

Recent advances in satellite monitoring, AI-driven analysis, and automated verification have started to close these gaps. High-resolution satellite imagery, combined with AI, is providing businesses with a clearer view of sourcing regions in near real time, eliminating the need for costly and time-consuming manual assessments. This enables businesses to track land use changes, detect deforestation, and monitor supply chain risks at scale, with far greater accuracy than ever before. By integrating AI-powered analytics with first-mile data, businesses can identify risks before they escalate, proactively mitigating supply disruptions and strengthening long-term resilience.

Blockchain and AI: A Winning Formula for Supply Chain Integrity

Individual technologies have made significant strides in improving supply chain visibility. However, the real transformation occurs when organisations use these tools in combination with one another. AI and blockchain, in particular, have proven to be a powerful combination. As a pair, they enable businesses to both uncover risks and establish a verifiable record of supply chain actions. AI allows companies to process vast amounts of environmental and operational data, generating insights to inform smarter decision-making. Blockchain, on the other hand, immutably records every transaction, claim, and compliance step. This creates a transparent audit trail that eliminates ambiguity.

This approach has already demonstrated success in supply chains looking to improve the accuracy of carbon tracking and compliance reporting. For instance, Royal Family Farming, a Washington State based regenerative agriculture operation, leverages blockchain-backed traceability and AI-powered analysis to streamline verification processes for methane reduction projects. The result was a significant acceleration in project validation, cutting timelines from more than two years to just a few weeks. By integrating these technologies, businesses can move beyond outdated reporting methods and establish a level of traceability that meets both regulatory and market expectations.

Regulatory Shifts Present and Opportunity for Businesses to Get Ahead

Government oversight is playing an increasingly central role in shaping how businesses manage their supply chains. More than ever, non-compliance poses a reputational, financial, and operational. The delayed implementation of the EUDR and CSRD has created uncertainty, but it also allows businesses to prepare. Rather than viewing these delays as a temporary reprieve, forward-thinking companies are using this time to get ahead. They’re building more robust compliance frameworks, assessing their exposure to risk, and implementing the tools necessary to ensure traceability from the first mile onward.

The additional time allows organisations to strengthen supplier relationships, integrate new data streams, and evaluate the role of emerging technologies in reducing compliance burdens. AI-powered verification, blockchain-backed transparency, and automated monitoring solutions are helping businesses shift from reactive compliance to proactive risk management ensuring they are ready to meet regulatory requirements when enforcement begins and drive overall supply chain resilience.

Technology is the Key to Future-Proofing Supply Chains

The climate crisis is not slowing down, and the pressures facing supply chains will only intensify. The companies that will thrive in this new landscape are those that move beyond legacy approaches. Successful organisations will, instead, embrace technology-driven traceability and risk mitigation. The ability to understand and act on first-mile data is no longer just an operational advantage. It is becoming a fundamental requirement for businesses to remain competitive.

Technology is enabling businesses to improve the efficiency of supply chain operations. Not only that, but it is also helping manage risk, ensure compliance, enhance resilience, and thus unlock new market opportunities. By leveraging AI, blockchain, and advanced data analytics, companies can transition toward supply chains that are more than transparent. Beyond visibility, they actively contribute to decarbonisation efforts. Regulatory requirements will only become more stringent and climate risks will only grow more severe. Therefore, adopting a data-driven approach will be the key to ensuring long-term stability in an increasingly unpredictable world.

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