Despite growing sustainability commitments and significant investment in ESG programmes, most companies have not turned their supply chain sustainability ambitions into operational practice. The 2024–2025 research from MIT, Deloitte, CDP, and DSCI–APQC revealed a consistent pattern: the barriers are structural, data-driven, and organisational—not a failure of intention. Understanding the root causes is the starting point for doing something different.
The Scale of the Ambition–Action Gap
The mismatch between stated priorities and actual integration is striking. In the DSCI–APQC 2024 cross-industry survey, 62% of supply chain leaders say ESG is extremely or very important to their operations ; yet only 19% say their ESG strategy is fully integrated into business processes , and only 43% regularly use ESG performance as a criterion in supplier selection .
MIT's 2025 State of Supply Chain Sustainability research tells the same story: around 80% of businesses believe sustainability is important to long-term success , yet only 39% of those maintaining sustainability commitments have integrated it into day-to-day decision-making .
This isn't a failure of intention. It reflects structural barriers that consistently prevent companies from turning supply chain sustainability ambition into operational practice.
Causes Companies Struggle With Supply Chain Sustainability
The Data Gap: The Number One Barrier
The single most commonly cited obstacle across 2024–2025 research is the absence of reliable supplier data. Around 70% of companies say they do not have enough data from suppliers to accurately calculate their supply chain emissions, according to MIT's 2025 research. In the DSCI–APQC survey, 46% of supply chain leaders cite lack of reliable ESG data from suppliers as a top implementation challenge ; and only 30% say they have reliable data from their supply chain partners .
Deloitte's 2024 Sustainability Action Report reinforces this: 57% of large-company executives name ESG data quality as their single biggest reporting hurdle , and 88% rank it among their top three challenges . Among those reporting Scope 3, 64% struggle with confidence and completeness in primary data from supply chain partners .
Without reliable supplier data, companies cannot move beyond spend-based carbon proxies. This is a method that can overstate emissions by hundreds of percent. For a technical breakdown of why carbon footprint tracking fails at the method level, see Why Carbon Footprint Tracking in Supply Chains Is Unreliable .
Cost and ROI: The Business Case Problem
Cost is the second most pervasive barrier. In the DSCI–APQC survey, 48% of organisations cite cost as their most frequently cited ESG implementation challenge . MIT's 2025 research finds that 56% of companies say they lack a clear return on investment for Scope 3 reduction efforts, 50% say implementation costs are prohibitive , and 32% cite the high cost of measurement tools and software as a specific obstacle.
The problem is compounded by longer payback horizons. Sustainability investments often deliver returns through lower regulatory risk, improved supplier relationships, and enhanced investor access. The benefits are harder to quantify in the short-term financial models that drive capital allocation decisions.
Supplier Engagement: A Coordination Challenge
Even when companies want to act, engaging their supply chain in sustainability programmes is genuinely difficult. CDP's 2024 analysis found that only 15% of disclosing companies are actively targeting value-chain (Scope 3) emissions with reduction initiatives. Only 1 in 4 companies factor supply chain climate risks into enterprise risk management at all.
On the supplier side, the challenges are structural. In the DSCI–APQC study, 18% of organisations cite limited supplier cooperation and 13% report explicit resistance from suppliers to adopting ESG practices. Among companies running supplier engagement programmes through CDP, only around 2% of suppliers provide the product-level life-cycle assessment data buyers actually need for supply chain carbon programmes.
Smaller suppliers face the heaviest burden: they often lack the resources, systems, or expertise to respond to detailed sustainability data requests from multiple large customers—yet they collectively represent significant portions of many companies' supply chains.
Regulatory Complexity: A Driver That Also Confuses
Regulation is both pushing companies towards supply chain sustainability and adding to the difficulty of acting. The DSCI–APQC survey finds that 62% of organisations say regulatory requirements strongly influence their ESG efforts —but 25% of the same respondents cite "insufficient regulatory guidance or support" as a top implementation challenge.
Frameworks from the ISSB, SEC, and EU (CSRD, CSDDD) are evolving rapidly, and many organisations are "waiting to see" how rules finalise before committing significant resources—creating a pause in action that itself becomes a barrier.
Skills and Governance: The Capability Gap
Beyond data and cost, most organisations face a skills and governance gap that prevents sustainability from becoming embedded in supply chain operations. In the DSCI–APQC survey, 76% of respondents say their supply chain employees do not understand ESG strategy execution well . MIT's 2025 research finds that 53% cite a lack of standardised methodologies and 52% cite the complexity of Scope 3 calculations as key obstacles.
The governance picture is equally fragmented: one-third of organisations globally have not defined any ESG KPIs for supply chain leaders. IDC predicts that by 2026, only 45% of G2000 companies will have fully operationalised integrated sustainability in their supply chains—meaning more than half of the world's largest firms will still not have truly embedded sustainability into supply chain operations.
Why Strategies Alone Don't Close the Gap
Many companies have invested in sustainability consulting and advisory services to address these barriers. The results have been mixed. MIT's research finds an investment gap "across all ten supply chain sustainability issue areas"—meaning companies with sustainability strategies are not financially backing them across the board.
A 2024 CEPR review of green supply chains found that very little empirical evidence supports the assumption that green supply chain programmes can act as a conduit for emission reduction at a system level. Strategy without data does not scale.
“Very little empirical evidence supports the assumption that green supply chain programmes can act as a conduit for emission reduction”.
– 2024 CEPR review of green supply chains
Most advisory engagements produce roadmaps and frameworks—but not the measurement infrastructure needed to make sustainability operational across procurement, logistics, and supplier selection. For a deeper look at why advisory services struggle to deliver supply chain outcomes, see Why Sustainability Advisory Services Fail in Supply Chains .
What Actually Works
The companies making measurable progress share a common pattern: they start with data. Accurate, activity-based measurement of supply chain emissions—rather than spend-based proxies—gives procurement teams something actionable: real CO2e figures by supplier, by category, and by transaction.
CDP's supplier engagement data shows that among companies that request and act on environmental transparency from suppliers, collective Scope 3 reductions have reached 633 million metric tonnes , with cost savings of $19.3 billion . The common factor is not the strategy—it is the data.
Platforms like Simple make activity-based measurement feasible by extracting emissions data from existing business documents—invoices, purchase orders, contracts—without requiring new supplier data collection processes. This closes the supplier data gap that 70% of companies cite as their top barrier, and gives procurement teams a foundation for meaningful supplier engagement and selection.
For the full picture on why sustainable brands are failing, see Why Most Sustainable Brands Fail: The Hidden Supply Chain Crisis . For the technical measurement failures behind the data gap, see Why Carbon Footprint Tracking in Supply Chains Is Unreliable .