While corporate commitment to supply chain sustainability is at a ‘record high’, governance gaps and external disruptions are providing a barrier to execution, a new study by MIT’s Center for Transportation and Logistics has suggested.
The 2026 State of Supply Chain Sustainability Report from the MIT Sustainable Supply Chain Lab surveyed 1,810 supply chain professionals across 91 countries.
More commitment
It found that 83% of respondents rated sustainability as either ‘important’ or ‘very important’ to long-term business success, the highest level in the report’s seven-year history. In addition, 59% said that they had become ‘more committed’ to sustainability following recent US policy shifts.
At the same time, however, more than two thirds (68%) said that tariff uncertainty had forced their organisations to delay, scale back or abandon sustainability strategies, while close to one-third reported that tariff-related disruption had increased their operational emissions.
‘This has led to a sustainability agenda that is ‘stuck between conviction and constraint’, MIT noted.
“Commitment is strong, measurement is expanding, and AI is accelerating,” said 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 decarbonisation into genuine transition.”
Challenging times
More than eight in ten respondents across North America, Europe and Asia said that ongoing geopolitical conflict is reducing the effectiveness of their organisations’ climate action, with most firms basing their decarbonisation plans on assumptions of stable trade and relative peace.
Internal vulnerabilities were also cited – among companies with publicly stated sustainability targets, just over half (51%) have established a formal cross-functional sustainability team, while only 33% have board-level sustainability oversight.
Among organisations with cross-functional teams, 57% answered that sustainability is ‘frequently’ or ‘always’ incorporated into decisions, while in situations where responsibility sits in a single function, that drops to 13%.
Operational choices
The study also found that sustainability is most commonly embedded in areas where businesses make daily operational choices, including transportation and logistics (39%), procurement (35%), warehousing (34%), and product design (33%).
This, however, ‘thins out dramatically in decisions that lock in long-term emissions: capital investment, network design, and supply chain risk planning,’ MIT noted. ‘This reveals that companies are becoming better at operating more sustainably, but not at designing sustainable supply chains in the long term.’
Elsewhere, AI is playing an increasingly important role in sustainability decision-making, with around four fifths (78%) of North American organisations using AI in sustainability initiatives, with 87% of adopters reporting a positive impact. Some 86% have reduced material waste, 81% have reduced energy use, and 63% use AI to estimate missing supplier emissions data. Read more here.
