Climate exposure starts upstream
The problem
Most companies model climate risk where they have visibility — distribution, logistics, owned facilities. They miss raw material sourcing, which is where ecosystem depletion and climate sensitivity actually bite. A company can have a well-mapped logistics risk profile and still be blind to the fact that a critical input comes from a single region facing severe water stress. The blind spot comes from how risk assessment is scoped: it follows the org chart, not the material flow.
Why it matters
- Cost — supply interruption and input price volatility hit margin directly.
- Timeline — this is a current operating risk, not a 2050 scenario.
- Compliance — regulators increasingly ask for upstream exposure, not just direct operations.
The approach
Combine geospatial and satellite data, supply chain mapping, and frontier model synthesis to stitch together fragmented supplier and sourcing information and surface exposure patterns a spreadsheet exercise would miss. The insight — that raw material exposure is the underweighted risk — comes from natural capital and EP&L methodology. The tooling makes it tractable at speed.
The kind of finding this surfaces: mapping raw material sourcing against climate scenarios points to risk mitigation opportunities in the region of 10–15% of annual procurement costs, without adding headcount.