Global Climate Action Series: Cisco Supply Chain Driving Positive Climate Action

This blog was guest written by Lisa Brady, Director, Supply Chain Sustainability, Cisco.

Cisco has a long track record of working to address issues that impact our planet. We firmly believe that doing the right thing for the environment is also the right thing for our business.

As a company, we have set long-term goals to reduce the environmental impacts from our products and operations, and we work with our upstream and downstream partners to reduce the environmental impact of our value chain, as well.

In 2016, Cisco set a goal to avoid 1 million metric tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) by 2020. This was part of a comprehensive strategy bringing together existing carbon reduction activities with newly planned initiatives to address climate change across our value chain.

One of our latest projects involves working with our 3rd-party freight invoicing partner to capture the primary logistics data from all of the bills processed on behalf of Cisco. Armed with this information, we can calculate the overall logistics carbon footprint and identify opportunities to optimize the networks and increase efficiencies.

For example, our Mode Shift initiative optimizes global factory-to-factory shipments, shifting transportation modes from air to ocean whenever feasible while still meeting customer expectations. We also have various projects including packaging, product materials, scrap optimization, and energy management at our contract manufacturing partners.

In FY18, these projects helped us avoid nearly 200,000 metric tonnes of GHG emissions, helping towards our 2020 goal.

To have a direct stake in supplier GHG reduction, we are driving supplier reporting of emissions and reduction targets through CDP’s Supply Chain Program. CDP, formerly the Carbon Disclosure Project, is a nonprofit organization that runs the leading global disclosure system for investors, companies, cities, and states to manage their environmental impacts.

Cisco has been recognized as a Supplier Engagement Leader and was included in CDP’s Supplier Climate A-List (2018), highlighting our decisive climate action in the areas of measuring, verifying, and managing the carbon footprint of our direct operations and supply chain.

In FY19, we will leverage data from years of collecting and analyzing the emissions of our upstream and downstream suppliers to take our work forward, setting new expectations and investing in capabilities to help our suppliers achieve more significant reductions in emissions and develop roadmaps toward waste-free operations.

We know that meaningful action is needed if we are going to help bend the curve of emission reductions towards 2020. We will continue to look for innovative ways to leverage the power of technology and collaboration to help us reduce our environmental impact and set new ambitious targets going forward.

Read the complete Global Climate Action series to learn how Cisco is stepping up our workplace sustainability and about our recently announced ambitious product energy efficiency goal.