Another week, another round of news and research related to Green Supply Chain Management.  Yesterday, the Carbon Disclosure Project announced the release of its “Supply Chain Report 2009,” written by PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP and sponsored by RedPrairie (you can download the report at RedPrairie’s website).  Thirty-four CDP member companies, including Cadbury, Colgate-Palmolive, Johnson & Johnson, P&G, and Unilever, asked their major suppliers to report on their carbon footprint and climate change strategies.  Only 27 percent of the suppliers responded, and the first paragraph of the CDP press release summarizes the key finding of the research:

“Of 634 suppliers surveyed globally by the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP), only 58% considered that climate change posed a risk to their operations, while one third said it posed no risk, showing there is still a lack of understanding from suppliers of the business threats from climate change“.

This finding doesn’t surprise me.  In fact, back in January, I wrote about Dell and the criticism it was getting for adopting a narrow carbon footprint definition (see “Defining Carbon Neutrality“).  As I wrote at the time, “Is Dell’s carbon footprint definition too narrow?  I think this question is irrelevant because, as the [Wall Street Journal] article highlights, many suppliers don’t have the means, knowledge, or incentive to measure their emissions.  And without universally accepted standards and metrics, there’s no way to ensure consistency in the data received from suppliers around the world.”

A couple of weeks ago, Accenture announced the results of a survey it conducted with 245 supply chain executives around the world.  The highlights (or lowlights): only 10 percent of companies actively model their supply chain carbon footprints and have implemented successful sustainability initiatives, and more than one-third (37 percent) of supply chain executives have no awareness of the level of supply chain emissions in their supply chain network.

Simply stated, the key finding of the research we conducted more than a year ago on the State of Green Supply Chain Management still holds true: we’re still in the early adopter phase.  But I expect more companies to launch green supply chain initiatives if the U.S. passes cap-and-trade regulation, as the President’s proposed budget fully anticipates.

In the software realm, SAP announced on Monday that it will reduce its greenhouse gas emissions down to its year-2000 levels by the year 2020.  SAP formed a new cross-functional sustainability organization and appointed Peter Graf as the company’s first chief sustainability officer and executive vice president of Sustainability Solutions.  The company also unveiled expanded solutions for environment, health and safety (EHS) management.

Finally, back in November, I highlighted the threat of asteroids extinguishing life on Earth sometime in the future, thus making all of this “green” stuff a waste of time (see “All Greened Out (Until the Asteroid Comes)“).  Well, it happened again on Monday-another asteroid came within 46,000 miles of the planet and it wasn’t detected until two days before it zoomed by.  Asteroid 2009 DD45 was about two hundred feet long, big enough to create damage equivalent to a nuclear blast if it had struck the planet.  If I wasn’t paranoid back in November, I am now.

And with that, enjoy the weekend.