Companies have strengthened sustainability programs inside their own businesses, but oversight weakens sharply across supplier networks where most environmental and human rights risks reside. New EcoVadis research shows that limited supplier data, inconsistent verification, and weak visibility beyond Tier 1 are emerging as significant constraints on Scope 3 reporting, regulatory compliance, and the effective use of AI in procurement.
Sustainability Programs Are Advancing, But Data Stops At Tier 1
The latest EcoVadis Sustainability Ratings Index, based on nearly 200,000 scorecards for more than 100,000 companies between 2021 and 2025, points to a split inside global supply chains. Internal operations now carry mature environmental and social programs, yet structured oversight of upstream partners remains sparse beyond the first tier.
Environmental performance has improved fastest on company sites, with average scores rising 9.6 points over four years and the share of firms classed as Advanced+ more than doubling from 17 percent to 38 percent. Labor and human rights programs are also broadly embedded: average scores sit near 60 on the EcoVadis 0–100 scale, around 80 percent of rated organizations have formal diversity and inclusion policies, and close to the same share hold written employee health and safety commitments.
Deeper in the network, however, basic governance is missing. Four in five companies rated by EcoVadis have no documented method to identify or manage sustainability risk across tier 2 and beyond. Seventy-three percent do not report upstream Scope 3 emissions and 77 percent capture no downstream data at all, despite growing pressure from frameworks such as the EU Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive and emerging product-level disclosure rules in several markets.
Protection for workers in subcontracted or remote facilities is just as thin. Only 2 percent of rated firms provide an external grievance channel that people working deeper in the chain can realistically access and use to flag human rights violations. Fewer than 1 percent supply granular, decision-grade sustainability data to their customers, which blocks buyers from integrating supplier-level risk and performance signals into routine planning and sourcing decisions.
Procurement process design compounds the gap. The Index shows that 42 percent of organizations still depend on unverified supplier questionnaires as their main source of ESG information, while only 46 percent require suppliers to sign a sustainability code of conduct. On-site audits, which remain one of the few ways to validate conditions in complex categories or high-risk regions, are used by just 20 percent of firms, a proportion that has barely shifted in four years. Many networks are therefore governed on paper but not in practice.
AI Investment Collides With a Weak Measurement Base
The companion EcoVadis Barometer 2026 report suggests that digital transformation is now running ahead of data readiness. Sixty-eight percent of corporate buyers in the survey have deployed artificial intelligence tools in sustainable procurement programs, with 62 percent of that group using AI for carbon data validation and related analysis.
These applications rely on structured, comparable inputs from hundreds or thousands of suppliers. Yet 30 percent of suppliers in the same dataset provide no carbon information at all, and a further 26 percent submit only aggregated estimates. That leaves more than half of the supply base either silent or too vague for useful analysis, even as regulatory regimes and investors are demanding more detailed Scope 3 evidence.
EcoVadis chief rating officer Sylvain Guyoton characterizes this as a measurement problem rooted in the supply base rather than in analytics capability. Organizations have invested in sophisticated systems to analyze supplier sustainability data, but the underlying records are often missing, unaudited or locked in formats the tools cannot process at scale. Better software does not close that gap on its own.
The Index and Barometer together outline a different path: sustained supplier engagement built around structured assessment, scored performance and documented follow-through. That means repeating evaluations over time, feeding scores into sourcing and category strategies, and tying improvement plans to commercial levers such as preferred status, volume allocation or financing terms. Industry reports on Scope 3 progress show that networks treating engagement as a continuous process typically move faster on emissions reduction and risk remediation than those running one-off compliance campaigns.
For network design, the findings underline the need to embed sustainability measurement into standard operating procedures rather than bolt it onto reporting cycles. Examples include aligning supplier onboarding with minimum data and disclosure requirements, codifying grievance and escalation channels into contracts, and linking internal planning systems to external rating platforms so that sustainability performance can influence inventory, capacity and footprint decisions alongside cost and service.
Supplier Data Is Becoming Part of Core Enterprise Data
Sustainability information is beginning to follow the same trajectory as financial, quality, and traceability data. What was once collected periodically for reporting is increasingly expected to be standardized, continuously updated, and connected to enterprise systems. As disclosure requirements expand and AI becomes more widely embedded in procurement and supply chain processes, supplier-level environmental and social data will need to meet the same expectations for consistency, auditability, and governance as other business-critical information. That shift places greater emphasis on building repeatable data collection and validation processes across the supply base rather than relying on annual questionnaires or reporting exercises.