FiRe Conference Highlights: ESG Risks and Embodied Carbon
Key takeaways from Cynthia Figge’s FiRe panels on supply chain risk and embodied carbon — two ESG priorities shaping corporate sustainability strategies.
As previously seen on the CSRHub blog.
CSRHub CEO and Co-founder Cynthia Figge recently moderated two panels at the Future in Review (FiRe) Conference, offering key insights on emerging supply chain risks and also on embodied carbon:
Emerging Supply Chain Risks with Ilya Levtov, CEO of Craft.co, and Sydney House, ESG Product Lead of Certa. Both are partners of CSRHub and focus on managing supply chain risks through data intelligence.
The Business of Embodied Carbon with Andrew Himes, Director of Collective Impact of Carbon Leadership Forum, and David Victor, Distinguished Professor of the University of California San Diego and Director of the Deep Carbonization Initiative.
Why It Matters
These panels underscore CSRHub’s role in providing transparent ESG data to help companies and advisory firms navigate evolving sustainability expectations from supply chain risks to low-carbon building strategies.
Here are some highlights of these dynamic panels. Also see below links to the panel videos.
Emerging Supply Chain Risks
The panel explored the rising significance of supply chain risk management. Global supply chains face increasing pressures from climate events and geopolitical tensions to shifting regulations like CSRD and California’s SB 253 and EU deforestation rules.
Panel key points:
- Beyond financial risk: Companies’ top risks are financial, operational, cyber security, geopolitical, and ESG (environmental, social and governance), including human rights and climate impacts across their supply networks.
- Multi-tier visibility: AI and multi-source data like CSRHub are enabling risk mapping beyond Tier 1 suppliers.
- Quiet sustainability work: Even amid the ESG backlash, companies are quietly continuing resilience and compliance efforts in managing their supply chains.
- Data verification: Multiple external data sources help validate supplier-reported ESG metrics.
- Orchestration of data: high quality, well organized structured third-party data enables scaling analysis, and also enables AI models to work more effectively.
Watch The Panel
The Business of Embodied Carbon
This session highlighted embodied carbon, the greenhouse gas emissions associated with the production of a product or material, encompassing its entire life cycle from extraction and manufacturing to transportation and disposal. It quantifies the carbon footprint of a product's "embodied" energy and materials, which accounts for nearly a fifth of global GHG emissions. Note that in addition, buildings’ operational emissions account for nearly 30% of global GHG emissions.
Panel key points:
Tackling embodied carbon requires deep decarbonization beyond operational energy savings.
Shared data standards, like Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs), are helping companies measure and compare material impacts.
Innovation in low-carbon materials (e.g., mass timber, bamboo) and strong industrial policy will be key to scaling solutions.
Watch The Panel
The Business of Embodied Carbon
About CSRHub
CSRHub offers the most comprehensive global set of expert consensus sustainability ratings, information, and tools. Clients use CSRHub’s decisive data platform for global benchmarking, supply and value chain risk assessment and compliance readiness solutions. Founded in 2007, CSRHub covers nearly 60,000 public and private companies, and provides ESG performance scores on 42,000 companies from 134 industries in 158 countries. Our Big Data platform uses algorithms to aggregate, normalize and weight ESG metrics from 1,000 sources to produce a strong consensus signal on corporate sustainability performance.
