For organizations looking to reduce Scope 3 emissions, supplier engagement quickly becomes a question of where to focus time and resources. Supply chains can span hundreds or even thousands of businesses, each with different operations, emissions profiles, and levels of influence over your overall footprint.
Engaging every supplier with the same level of intensity is neither practical nor necessarily useful. Procurement and sustainability teams therefore need to prioritize, often focusing first on suppliers based on factors such as purchasing volume, emissions contribution, or strategic importance.
In sectors such as automotive, that priority group alone can still contain hundreds of suppliers. Even within smaller supplier populations, such as those found in some grocery supply chains, a priority cohort could include businesses that look similar through the lens of spend or emissions but are very different in their ability to measure and reduce them.
This is where prioritization alone starts to fall short. Knowing which suppliers matter most tells you where to focus, but it doesn't necessarily tell you how to engage them. Within the same priority cohort, one supplier could be reporting emissions for the first time, another could already have sophisticated carbon data, while another may understand exactly where its emissions sit but have limited technical or financial ability to reduce them.
Holding each to the same expectations can therefore create problems. You risk making oversophisticated requests of suppliers that aren't ready, while making undersophisticated requests of those capable of going further.
Consider two suppliers within the same grocery supplier program. One is a grower whose operations depend heavily on the heat required for greenhouse production. Its ability to decarbonize may be constrained by the technical and commercial realities of changing that heat source. Another is a large food manufacturer with significantly different resources, internal capabilities and potential routes to decarbonization. Both could be important suppliers sitting within the same priority cohort, but expecting them to follow exactly the same pathway overlooks what they are realistically equipped to do next.
This isn't necessarily an argument for different ambitions. It's an argument for different routes towards them. The challenge lies in understanding where each supplier actually is on their sustainability journey - something that is not always immediately obvious from the information you hold.
Your Scope 3 data can tell you a lot about your suppliers, but it doesn't necessarily provide a complete picture of their maturity.
A supplier that isn't reporting emissions data to you could already be reporting extensively to another buyer. They might have established emissions targets or be running their own decarbonization program internally without that activity being visible to you.
Commercial relationships matter too. Suppliers already field sustainability requests from multiple buyers, making their attention a limited resource. Where you sit within a supplier's own priorities - often influenced by order volume or account size - can affect how quickly they respond, or whether they respond at all. A supplier that appears unresponsive may simply be prioritizing another customer.
The same caution applies to established signals of climate ambition. SBTi validation, for example, is a meaningful indicator, but it isn't a universal measure of supplier maturity. According to SBTi's own 2025 trend tracker, validated targets are unevenly distributed globally: Europe accounts for 49% of companies with validated targets, Asia 36%, and North America 11%, with other regions representing much smaller proportions. Japan alone has more validated companies than any other individual territory.
Context like this is worth understanding before using any single signal as the bar every supplier is expected to clear. Don't mistake an absence of data for an absence of progress. Instead, look at what you know about a supplier's capability, ambition, and constraints, and use that to determine what should happen next. Collecting supplier emissions data is only the starting point; its real value comes from using it to inform decisions and drive action.
At scale, this doesn't mean manually investigating every supplier. Instead, maturity signals can be built into the way a supplier engagement program operates, helping to route suppliers towards an appropriate next request based on the capability, ambition or constraints they demonstrate. The aim isn't to create an exhaustive profile of every supplier, but to avoid automatically putting everyone through the same engagement sequence.
A supplier may show signs of existing capability - perhaps through established targets, credible data practices or wider sustainability activity - without currently reporting emissions data to you. Where those signals are present, the supplier could be routed away from introductory education or standard questionnaires towards a more targeted request.
That might involve establishing what emissions data or reporting processes are already in place, including whether the supplier is already responding to similar requests from other customers. If they're further along in their journey elsewhere, the aim should be to use what already exists rather than asking them to start again. Where that capability already exists, the appropriate next step may be targeted disclosure rather than basic education.
For procurement teams, this is an important efficiency point. There is little value in taking a sophisticated supplier through introductory engagement simply because its existing capability isn't visible within your own reporting data.
Other maturity signals may point to a supplier that has ambition but is struggling to translate it into action. An emissions target - potentially even a validated one - combined with a good understanding of its major emissions sources but little visible implementation progress could indicate that practical constraints, rather than willingness, are the barrier.
Here, the distinction between “can't” and “won't” becomes important. Lack of action doesn't necessarily mean a lack of ambition. The supplier may be constrained by engineering expertise, feasibility analysis, financing or implementation planning. Underneath those challenges can sit the even harder commercial problem of the business case.
Suppliers often own the assets that ultimately need to be changed or replaced, but decarbonization projects still have to compete internally for capital against other operational priorities. Without a clear return on investment, securing that capital can be difficult even when the organization genuinely wants to reduce emissions.
While a buyer can't necessarily solve these challenges for the supplier, recognizing that they are constrained rather than resistant changes how you respond. Another questionnaire or greater pressure may achieve very little, while patience, proportionate escalation and, where appropriate, support may be more useful.
This is where understanding maturity starts to bridge the gap between ambition and delivery. Rather than simply looking at supplier response rates, it becomes more useful to understand what might be preventing a supplier from taking the next step.
Where those more established maturity signals are absent - with no visible target, little reporting history and limited evidence of emissions capability - a supplier may need to enter the program at an earlier stage.
In this case, immediately requesting a comprehensive Scope 1–3 inventory or sophisticated product-level carbon data risks introducing unnecessary friction. As we've explored in our article: Why Product Carbon Footprints are moving up the procurement agenda, product-level data can provide procurement teams with valuable insight for decision-making. But the request still needs to reflect what a supplier is currently capable of providing.
For a supplier at an earlier stage, a lower-friction request may make more sense. This could mean starting with information about the energy or fuel types used at facility level before progressing towards a more comprehensive emissions breakdown.
It's also important to remember that you don't need every supplier to reach the same level of maturity before you can start making decisions. Some suppliers may be ready for sophisticated data requests or implementation conversations while others are still establishing their baseline. Progress across a supply chain doesn't have to happen in perfect unison.
Understanding supplier maturity isn't about putting every supplier into a neat category or creating another scoring exercise. It's about having enough context to make the next interaction appropriate. Prioritizing suppliers by emissions, spend or strategic importance can tell you where to focus your resources, whereas understanding maturity helps you decide how to use those resources effectively.
A supplier that can't respond, a supplier that won't respond, and a supplier that is already doing the work but simply isn't reporting it to you may look surprisingly similar when viewed only through your own Scope 3 data. But the right response to each is very different.
For procurement and sustainability teams, this means moving beyond a one-size-fits-all approach. The ambition doesn't necessarily have to change, but the route towards it might. By using maturity signals to better understand what suppliers are ready for, engagement programs can move beyond putting everyone through the same process and instead make more appropriate requests that move suppliers closer to action.