The Fragility Gap: Why Your Carbon Data Is Now Part of Your Customer's Risk Profile
For most of the past five years, the carbon conversation between brands and their suppliers has been about whether a number exists. Did you submit to CDP? Do you have a Scope 1 and 2 figure? Have you completed the EcoVadis questionnaire? The 2026 Carbon Action Report from EcoVadis and Kearney, released this month, suggests the question has changed. Buyers are no longer asking only whether you have a number. They are asking whether they can trust it.
EcoVadis has a name for what happens when they can't. It calls it the Fragility Gap: the distance between how resilient a company believes its supply chain is and how exposed it actually remains when the carbon data underneath is unverified. Pierre-François Thaler, EcoVadis co-founder and co-CEO, told Supply & Demand Chain Executive that companies are making capital and sourcing decisions on "carbon numbers they can't actually trust."
That framing is aimed at procurement leaders at the world's largest brands. But every gap in a buyer's Scope 3 inventory is a supplier's data submission somewhere upstream. If you manufacture ingredients, packaging or components for a major brand, the Fragility Gap is being measured in your numbers.
Brands have concluded they cannot do this without you
The reason any of this reaches suppliers is a conclusion brands have arrived at over the past two or three years. Having set targets covering emissions they do not directly control, they have run out of reductions they can deliver on their own. The remaining bulk of work sits in facilities outside financial or operational control.
That shift was on display at Climate Week in New York this week. Levi Strauss & Co. and Marks & Spencer launched the Fashion Renewable Collaborative with Schneider Electric's SE Advisory Services, a program built specifically to help their suppliers understand, access and actually procure renewable electricity. Jennifer DuBuisson, Senior Director of Sustainability at Levi Strauss & Co., said it had become abundantly clear that "the most effective way forward on emissions reduction" was partnering with suppliers, and described the collaborative as a way to help suppliers adopt renewable power while cutting unnecessary duplication across brands. The founding partners point to research from the World Resources Institute and the Apparel Impact Institute finding that shifting manufacturing to renewable electricity represents roughly two-thirds of the sector's identified emissions-reduction potential.
The specifics are apparel, but the pattern is not. We are seeing the same thing in personal care and specialty chemicals. Mid-market manufacturers are already receiving detailed renewable energy requests, asking for forward-looking strategies covering how they intend to source renewable power for the production not simply a figure for last year's electricity mix. The requests come with an expected timeline attached. This is a different kind of ask than a questionnaire, and it is becoming more common.
Two things follow for suppliers. The first is that the requests are getting more operational. They now reach into how you source energy, how you run your processes and what you ask of your own upstream suppliers. It raises the operational and disclosure bar, because the work only counts to a customer once it is documented, evidenced and verified in a form their procurement team can actually use. A renewable electricity contract that never makes it into a defensible Scope 2 figure is invisible to the buyer deciding where to place volume next year.
The second is that brands are increasingly coordinating these requests rather than each issuing their own, which is exactly what the FRC is designed to do and exactly what shared assessment platforms already do. Coordination cuts duplication, which is good news for a supplier answering the same question fifteen different ways. It also means one weak disclosure now travels further than it used to.
For many of your customers, EcoVadis is the procurement process
It is worth being clear about why the carbon data you submit to EcoVadis carries so much weight. For a large share of brand and chemical customers, EcoVadis is not a side exercise run by the sustainability team. It sits inside sourcing. By EcoVadis's own count, procurement teams at more than 1,400 multinationals use its ratings to make purchasing decisions.
L'Oréal is the clearest example for suppliers in beauty and personal care. The company's CSR evaluation of suppliers draws on social audit compliance, its Inclusive Sourcing program, CDP Supply Chain results and the supplier's EcoVadis assessment. The suppliers evaluated this way account for more than 83% of its direct purchases, which include raw materials, packaging and subcontracting. More than 1,000 L'Oréal suppliers have now had their social, environmental and ethical policies assessed through EcoVadis.
The chemical industry has gone further by building EcoVadis into a shared procurement standard. Together for Sustainability was founded in 2011 as a procurement-driven initiative by chemical companies including Evonik, BASF, Bayer, Henkel, Lanxess and Solvay, and its supplier assessments are carried out by EcoVadis. Members share supplier evaluations on the principle that an assessment for one member counts as an assessment for all, which means a single scorecard can travel to every TfS customer you serve. Some members have written the rating directly into buying decisions. ICL, for example, began including EcoVadis results in its tender process in 2022 and moved to require a valid EcoVadis scorecard in sourcing from 2023. Brand customers outside the chemical sector set the condition directly. Unilever's Supplier Climate Programme defines supplier climate leadership as three things: setting an SBTi-aligned target, publicly reporting progress against it, and sharing product-level GHG footprint data with Unilever. The program is aimed at the raw material, ingredient and packaging suppliers that Unilever estimates account for 63% of its emissions, and by the end of 2024 it had engaged 291 suppliers covering roughly 42% of the relevant Scope 3 footprint.
This is why the reliability of that data matters so much. The carbon data you submit is no longer read in isolation by a sustainability analyst. It sits on the same platform procurement already uses to shortlist and qualify suppliers. The report finds that 20% of companies with verified data now select suppliers based on carbon performance, about 13 times the rate among companies with low-reliability data. As more buyers reach that level, a weak carbon grade stops being a disclosure issue and starts being a sourcing issue, and the buyer reading your scorecard will not have your explanation next to it.
Reliability now has a grade, and buyers can see it
The mechanism behind all this is EcoVadis's Data Reliability Level framework. It is worth understanding in detail because it is now attached to every emissions metric submitted through the platform. Each figure passes through three gates. The first checks evidence, cross-referencing what you submitted against supporting documentation such as a CDP response or sustainability report. The second checks rigor, assessing whether your accounting follows the GHG Protocol and whether it has been third-party verified. The third checks plausibility, comparing your figures against industry benchmarks to flag outliers.
The result is one of four grades. Low means the evidence was missing, invalid or outdated, or the number failed the plausibility test, and EcoVadis considers it unusable for primary accounting. Medium reflects some recognized practice without full methodological alignment. High means the methodology is validated against international standards and the evidence holds up. Verified means an independent auditor has signed off.
Across the network, a third of reporters sit at Low, a fifth at Medium, a third at High, and only 12% at Verified. That distribution matters because buyers see the grade next to your number before they decide whether to use it. A Low grade means your customer will likely replace your figure with an estimate, which erases whatever real performance you have achieved. A spend-based estimate treats every producer in a category as interchangeable, and a verified primary figure is the only way to prove you are not.
Verified data is starting to behave like a commercial credential
The finding most relevant to suppliers is not about emissions at all. Companies with verified Scope 1 and 2 data have a median of 31 buyer connections on the platform. Companies with low-reliability data have 11. EcoVadis is careful to present this as a correlation, and larger companies naturally have both more customers and more resources for verification. Still, the report's interpretation is that verified data is becoming a signal that helps suppliers attract business, and the buyer case studies back that up.
Becton, Dickinson and Company now makes science-based targets a condition of preferred supplier status. Colt Technology Services writes a sustainability schedule into supplier contracts that requires high-emitting suppliers to commit to SBTs and share data. Hitachi Rail has moved 20% of its purchased goods and services emissions onto primary supplier data in a single year, up from 15%. Accor runs a recognition program that awards suppliers carbon medals. After one supplier displayed its gold medal at an industry convention, a competitor called Accor the next day asking how to qualify. None of these programs reward the supplier that simply filled in the form.
There is also a concentration effect worth noting. The top 10% of emitters in the network account for 95% of reported emissions and are connected to an average of 72 buyers each. Buyers are being told, explicitly, to focus there first. If your operations are energy or process intensive, as much of chemical and ingredient manufacturing is, you may be in that group for your customers even as a mid-sized company, and the attention you receive will reflect it.
Better data pays off inside your own operations too
Companies with high-reliability or verified data cut gross Scope 1 and 2 emissions by 4.4% over two years, against 2.6% for those with lower-reliability data. Among companies with science-based targets, those with verified data stay on track 77% of the time, compared with 54% for everyone else. And companies with verified data are roughly eight times more likely to engage their own suppliers on carbon, which the report links to a sixfold improvement in hitting science-based targets.
The logic is not mysterious. You cannot manage a number you do not trust. When a company invests in proper activity data, emission factors and verification, the same work that earns a High or Verified grade also shows it where its reductions are actually coming from.
The Intermediate plateau is where most suppliers stall
EcoVadis grades carbon maturity on five levels: Insufficient, Beginner, Intermediate, Advanced and Leader. The early steps are relatively accessible. About a third of Beginner companies move up to Intermediate on reassessment. The step from Intermediate to Advanced is where progress stalls, with only 16% making that move in the past year.
The report identifies the actions most associated with breaking through. They include linking management pay to GHG reductions, partnering with suppliers on reductions, collecting primary Scope 3 data from suppliers, adopting a time-bound transition plan and setting a dedicated GHG management budget. What these have in common is that none of them are disclosure exercises. They are governance and operating decisions. A company can answer every questionnaire perfectly and still sit at Intermediate indefinitely if its carbon program has no owner, no budget and no connection to how people are evaluated.
For mid-market manufacturers, that is the honest diagnosis for many of the EcoVadis scorecards we review. The data exists, the policies exist, and the score has plateaued because the structure behind them has not caught up.
Product-level footprints are the next request
The report closes its buyer playbook by pointing to what comes after verified corporate data: product carbon footprints. Accor's supplier maturity pathway names PCFs as the explicit destination. Hitachi Rail is already working with key suppliers to develop product-level data. Becton, Dickinson and Company maps carbon intensity to the specific materials it buys so category managers can use it in sourcing decisions.
That trajectory is familiar. Brand customers have been asking suppliers for cradle-to-gate footprints on individual materials for several years, and the requests are becoming more specific about methodology and verification. A supplier whose corporate inventory already earns a High or Verified grade has a far shorter path to credible PCFs, because the activity data, allocation logic and emission factors are already in place and already audited.
Supplier pressure isn't easing, but it is getting more specific
The through-line of this report is one we keep returning to. The pressure on suppliers is not fading. It is sharpening. As Scope 3 requests get more specific, the scrutiny moves from whether you report to how well you report, and for many buyers that grade now feeds directly into who they buy from. The practical question for a mid-market supplier is no longer whether to invest in carbon data, but whether the data you already produce would survive the three gates.
If you are not sure where your submissions land, that is a reasonable place to start. The foundation is a GHG inventory and product carbon footprints built to earn a High or Verified reliability grade. Around it sit EcoVadis and CDP submissions that hold up under evidence and plausibility checks, because those are the scorecards your customers' procurement teams are reading. If your EcoVadis carbon score has settled at Intermediate, we would be glad to take a look at what would move it.