Nearly 83% of supply chain professionals rate sustainability as important or very important to long-term business success, the highest level in the seven-year history of the State of Supply Chain Sustainability Report, presented by the MIT Sustainable Supply Chain Lab and supported by the C.H. Robinson Foundation, Breakthrough, CO2 AI and Dassault Systèmes.
But commitment is not the same as capacity.
While 59% of respondents report becoming more committed to sustainability following recent U.S. policy shifts, the same organizations are being forced to compromise those commitments.
And, 68% report that tariff uncertainty has compelled them to delay, scale back, or abandon sustainability strategies. Nearly one-third have seen tariff-related disruptions actually increase their operational emissions.
"Commitment is strong. Measurement is expanding. AI is accelerating," says Dr. Sreedevi Rajagopalan, director of the MIT Sustainable Supply Chain Lab and lead author of the report. "What comes next is harder: converting commitment into accountability, operational integration into strategic decision making, and incremental decarbonization into genuine transition."
Key takeaways:
· More than eight in 10 respondents across North America, Europe, and Asia agree that ongoing geopolitical conflict is reducing the effectiveness of the climate action they are taking. Organizations built decarbonization plans on assumptions of stable trade and relative peace, yet neither assumption is holding.
· Among companies with publicly stated sustainability goals, only 51% have established a formal cross-functional sustainability team. Only 33% place sustainability oversight at the board level. Companies with formal cross-functional teams report sustainability is "frequently or always" built into decisions 57% of the time. Where responsibility sits in a single function, that drops to 13%, a 44-point gap.
· Sustainability is embedding most deeply where companies make daily operational choices: transportation and logistics (39%), procurement (35%), warehousing (34%), and product design (33%).
· 78% of North American organizations report current use of AI in sustainability initiatives, and 87% of adopters report positive impact on sustainability goals.
· 86% have reduced material waste, 81% have reduced energy use, and 63% use AI to estimate missing supplier emissions data.
· Yet among mature Agentic AI users, only 53% report a reduction in total greenhouse gas emissions.
· 29% report an increase, suggesting that operational efficiency does not automatically translate into lower net emissions.
· Among advanced and fully automated warehouses using AI, 78% report higher energy use since implementing AI, and 76% report higher waste, yet only 24% use AI-driven real-time monitoring to track environmental consequences.
· Nearly every freight company is reducing emissions through route optimization, load consolidation, and driver-behavior programs. However, 43% of fleets still operate mostly or entirely on conventional diesel and only 8% have completed a full transition to low-emission energy.
· In Europe, 84% of freight companies report that recent policy changes have positively affected decarbonization strategy. In North America, only 44% do.
· Battery-electric vehicles are at scale in 60% of European companies vs. 36% in North America.
· Participation in joint supplier engagement and decarbonization programs surged from 31% to 58% in a single year.
· Partnerships to manage shared suppliers' emissions more than doubled, from 23% to 55%.
