Key takeaways
- Supply chain resilience is tied to business continuity, cost control and long-term value creation.
- For corporates, resilience starts with visibility across sourcing, emissions, social, biodiversity and supplier relationships.
- Supplier engagement works best when it moves from aspiration to execution through contracts, measurable targets.
- Decarbonisation, electrification and improved social conditions can strengthen resilience by reducing volatility and improving predictability.
- Finance scales incentives, reduces the cost of transition and helps companies and SMEs adopt greener technologies.
Supply chain resilience is increasingly being framed as an operational and financing issue. At BNP Paribas’ Sustainability Expert Forum, Barbara de Penanster, Global Sustainable Sourcing Director, Danone; Gilles Vermot Desroches, Chief Corporate Citizenship & Institutional Affairs Officer, Schneider Electric; and Shona Tatchell, Director of the Trade Facilitation Programme, European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), discussed how companies are linking resilience to financing and supplier strategy.
Input costs and climate risk are shaping resilience
Barbara de Penanster highlighted that resilience of food systems increasingly depends on securing the availability and affordability of critical inputs, with climate change already affecting supply security through water scarcity, lower agricultural yields and disruptions to local production.
De Penanster argued that resilience should be integrated into enterprise risk management rather than managed as a standalone sustainability agenda. Embedding climate and nature risks into business decisions strengthens resilience, supports long-term performance and makes sustainability a core business capability.
❝ Resilience is ensuring that we have access to supply, access to milk, access to every ingredient, access to chocolate and access to all the material. Today, in the current crisis, it also means access to packaging. Resilience is being able to access those raw materials at the right cost and at the right time. ❞
Supplier engagement is moving upstream
De Penanster highlighted that around 95% of Scope 3 emissions from purchased goods and services sit upstream, particularly in agriculture and packaging. She argued that this makes supplier engagement a central part of the response through contractual expectations and requests for science-based targets.
De Penanster added that the same issues affect farmers. Financing changes in farming methods and supporting adaptation measures can improve the economics of transition over time, with yields able to recover after two or three years and the cost of inaction potentially much higher.
Supply chain structure and execution
At Schneider Electric, having around 164 manufacturing sites, 85 distribution centres and approximately 25,000 suppliers around the world means our supply chain is not linear but interconnected, Gilles Vermot Desroches argued, which changes how companies like Schneider manage responsibility and resilience.
Gilles Vermot Desroches said Schneider Electric has worked with suppliers on these issues over the last 15 years. What began as a set of principles has become a more concrete framework covering risk management, environmental progress and social issues across the value chain.
❝ In 2021, we decided with our top 1,000 suppliers, through The Zero Carbon Project, to halve their operational carbon emissions in five years. We worked together and asked them to play an active role in improving efficiency, process electrification and adoption of renewable, among other things. We focus on collaboration, capability building and joint implementation to enable tangible impact. ❞
He said supplier engagement is central to resilience. “It is not a one-off request or a box-ticking exercise; it is a way of working together,”. In practice, this means setting clear expectations and treating suppliers as long-term partners rather than transactional counterparties. He also linked resilience to electrification, arguing that moving suppliers and partners towards electrification can reduce volatility and improve predictability in a period shaped by multiple disruptions. In that sense, transition strategies can also contribute to resilience planning.
Banking partnerships are central to scaling resilience
From the EBRD’s perspective, the challenge is how to channel finance through banking partners to suppliers across the value chain, using guarantees, funding and incentives to extend reach beyond direct financing.
Through green labels, sustainability certifications and its Green Technology Selector database, the EBRD helps banks and clients identify products and technologies that can qualify for discounts because they reduce carbon intensity, improve energy efficiency or deliver benefits for nature and water.
❝ We run a pricing incentive programme that delivers discounts, subject to verification that the underlying goods qualify as green or that the technologies support the transition to a lower-carbon production environment that ultimately benefits end users. ❞
Tatchell stressed that resilience cannot stop with large buyers. “You also have to reach the SMEs in their supply chains,” she said. That requires partnership, shared data, shared objectives and a stronger sense of fairness across the chain.
Visibility, coordination and scale
Across the discussion, speakers returned repeatedly to the need for better visibility, stronger supplier coordination and practical implementation, while also highlighting the role of data, supplier relationships and financing mechanisms in supporting resilience efforts across the value chain.
Taken together, the discussion suggested that supply chain resilience is becoming a strategic lever rather than a defensive exercise. For companies, the challenge is not simply to absorb shocks, but to build more visible, coordinated and financeable supply chains that can support continuity, accelerate transition and create long-term value. Visibility, collaboration and interconnections can become essential to turning resilience from a risk-management response into a source of shared, long-term value.
