Why Climate Risk Insights Are Essential for Supply Chain Resilience

Article key points: 

• Companies need to strengthen resilience against climate disruptions by translating environmental and social risk data into actionable strategies that protect operations, workers, and long-term supplier relationships.
• Worldly Axion helps sourcing and sustainability teams pinpoint where their supply chain is most exposed using predictive risk intelligence to identify regional vulnerabilities, facility-level performance gaps, and the areas where actions will drive the greatest impact.
• Companies can use Worldly Axion to turn sustainability into a business value driver with finance-ready insights and scenario modeling that show executives how climate action delivers ROI, reduces financial exposure, and supports smarter sourcing decisions.

Today’s global supply chains face unprecedented pressure. From the impacts of climate disruption on every aspect of business to rising resource costs, mounting regulatory demands, and increased scrutiny on fair labor practices, it’s no easy task to run a responsible, resilient, and successful business.

Why insights on climate risk and opportunity in your supply chain matter now more than ever

Climate and resource risks are no longer abstract. They directly affect where and how companies source, report, and invest. The challenge then becomes knowing where, when, how, and how much to invest for both the greatest human and environmental impact, and financial ROI.  

Meanwhile, sourcing and sustainability teams are drowning in data, and need a lot of resources to bring it all together in a meaningful and actionable way that drives real-world impact. Environmental assessments are excellent tools for capturing a supply chain’s current state, and environmental impact data over time, but don’t on their own have the broader context needed to pinpoint the highest risk areas and highest impact changes.

Worldly Axion solves this problem by combining facility performance data with supply chain risk intelligence to give companies more comprehensive, digestible insights so they can make better decisions. Worldly Axion transforms data into the ability to confidently take action, and helps companies move from reactive compliance to proactive resilience. 

Overlooking climate resilience within your supply chain is risky from multiple perspectives: human rights and labor, reputation, financial, regulatory, and even long-term survival. Just a few examples of this risk include: 

• The potential for a global GDP loss of about $4.86 trillion annually by 2050 in a slow transition scenario that doesn’t include sufficient climate adaptation.   
• Up to 40 percent higher instances of climate-related disasters by 2030, compared to 2015, if climate mitigation doesn’t accelerate. 
• An estimated $2.4 trillion in lost working hours by 2030 due to heat stress—the equivalent of 80 million full-time jobs.
• A loss of up to 25 percent of EBITDA for companies worldwide if a 2 degrees celsius warming scenario is allowed to transpire.

While risks are substantial, the rewards for businesses that choose to deal with climate risk head-on are also significant. According to World Resources Institute (WRI), companies that invest in climate adaptation could see greater than 10 times ROI within a decade. 

Worldly Axion combines primary supply chain data with climate risk intelligence 

 Worldly created Worldly Axion, in partnership with its customers and Earthena—a software firm with expertise in climate risk, supply chains, and AI—to address risks businesses around the world face when climate change impacts their supply chains.

“This partnership demonstrates the future of resilience intelligence,” said Karan Chopra, Co-Founder & Chief Product Officer of Earthena. “Together, we’re enabling decision makers to see hidden risks, act on new opportunities, and embed resilience into core business decisions.”

With your own business’s primary supply chain data as the foundation, combined with scientific and market data, consumer goods companies can use Worldly Axion to get insights on: 

• Where their supply chain is most exposed to climate and resource risks
• Which facilities are leading or lagging on clean energy, and what the next best actions could be
• How global shifts in policy, climate, and infrastructure will affect their operations over time. 

When companies combine their supply chain data with predictive analytics and risk intelligence using Worldly Axion, they are able to accomplish what was previously unachievable.  

1. Focus investments where you can drive maximum impact

Without unlimited resources, no business can prioritize every initiative at once. This is particularly true for sustainability teams that are often stretched thin while still being held accountable for ensuring environmental and social compliance within their supply chains. 

Determining where interventions will have the greatest payoff has historically been challenging, manual, expensive, and time consuming—if possible at all! With Axion, this is no longer the case.   

Worldly Axion combines facility-level performance data (such as energy mix, coal use, or production volume) with contextual and predictive intelligence (like grid decarbonization rates, carbon costs, and availability of renewable energy certificates), to show which facilities are best positioned for meaningful improvement.

Instead of spreading resources thinly across dozens, or hundreds, of facilities, teams can prioritize their focus on those with the greatest ROI based on insights such as: 

• Which regions are ready for electrification
• Which facilities should focus on switching to renewable energy (and which type)
• Where efficiency measures will yield the strongest returns

This approach minimizes wasted spend on low-impact initiatives and ensures sustainability investments deliver measurable impact.

2. Strengthen supply chain resilience

Today’s businesses don’t just have to worry about how their operations impact the planet. They also need to seriously consider how the planet will impact their operations. Climate disruptions are already here and reshaping supply chains with increasing frequency and severity each year.  

Droughts, heatwaves, floods, and shifting resource availability can put entire regions, and the suppliers within them, at risk. For global brands, what might have once been operational headaches are now major disruptions with real potential for lost revenue, reputational harm, and destabilized supplier relationships.

Worldly Axion helps businesses move from reacting to crises after they occur to proactively planning for them—and even avoiding them! By integrating facility-level environmental data (such as water usage or vulnerability indicators) with climate risk intelligence (like drought projections, extreme heat days, or water stress forecasts), companies can use Worldly Axion to pinpoint where regional exposure and supplier vulnerabilities overlap. This visibility allows teams to target resilience strategies where they’re needed most.

For example, a business could use Worldly Axion to flag five facilities in South Asia that are projected to face high water stress within the next year. Rather than waiting for water shortages to disrupt production, sustainability and sourcing teams can partner with those suppliers now to implement measures like water-efficient equipment upgrades, water recycling, on-site storage, and rainwater harvesting systems. By identifying risks before they escalate, companies strengthen resilience, protect workers, and avoid costly disruptions.

3. Bridge sustainability and sourcing

Sustainability and sourcing need to work more closely together than ever before. The rich social and environmental data that sustainability teams collect is high-value for procurement leaders, when it’s in the right context. It can inform contracts, purchasing strategies, or partnerships. 

Companies can use Worldly Axion to strengthen the sustainability-sourcing relationship by translating sustainability risks into sourcing-relevant intelligence, ensuring both teams work from the same insights. By turning country- and facility-level data into tangible intelligence, sourcing and procurement teams can act on risks that might otherwise remain abstract. For example, identifying a strategic supplier that’s projected to face a large number of severe heatwave days in the coming year and taking steps to prevent human suffering and production interruptions before they happen. 

4. Build compelling business cases

Sustainability initiatives will struggle to gain traction with executives and boards when they’re presented only as compliance requirements or long-term environmental goals. To secure real investment, teams need to show how climate and resource risks translate into financial and operational outcomes that matter to leadership.

Worldly Axion helps meet this need by turning complex sustainability data into clear, finance-ready insights. Through scenario modeling, businesses can use Worldly Axion to layer regional grid decarbonization rates, carbon pricing policies, and production targets to provide a scenario analysis that shows how quickly emissions would decline, reductions to financial exposure, and what the potential return on investment could look like.

Multiply your data’s impact with Worldly Axion

Worldly Axion was designed to help businesses cut through complexity and act with confidence. By uniting the industry’s most trusted facility-level data, combined with predictive risk intelligence, Worldly Axion doesn’t just add another layer to your sustainability toolkit—it’s an impact multiplier. If you’re ready to turn information into action and equip yourself with the ability to identify and predict your most likely supply chain risks, learn more about Worldly Axion and get started today.