More than one-quarter of 35,000 suppliers across nine industries and five regions including North America, Latin America and the Caribbean,Europe, Greater China and Asia, the Middle East and Africa have no health crisis measures—across supplier due diligence, employee health and safety and proper working conditions—in place, according to fourth edition of the Business Sustainability Risk and Performance Index by ratings platform EcoVadis, which drew on data from 2015 to 2019 and parsed them into four assessment themes: environment, labor and human rights, ethics and sustainable procurement.
While most scores improved by at least 9 per cent since 2015, those for sustainable procurement remain at the lowest end, EcoVadis said. Labor and human rights, which ticked up 11 percent from EcoVadis’s previous analysis, showed the biggest gains.
EcoVadis found that small and medium-size enterprises (SMEs) have shown consistent score improvements (a 6 percent increase over five years) while larger companies have presented more fluctuations. SMEs have also consistently outstripped their larger counterparts in the sustainable procurement area since 2015.
Europe remains the undisputed leader in sustainability performance with over a 10-point advantage compared to North America, which came in second, the analysis found. Greater China remains the lowest-scoring region, while performance in the AMEA and Latin America and the Caribbean is mixed.
