Supplier engagement, Scope 3, and upstream emissions in food, pulp and fertilizer — where the voluntary and regulatory levers point the same way.
For a food, paper or fertilizer company, most of the carbon is not in its own factories. It sits upstream, in the farms, forests and chemical plants that supply it — what greenhouse-gas accounting calls Scope 3, the emissions in a company’s value chain rather than its own operations. In agrifood the gap is wider than anywhere, because the bulk of the footprint sits where the raw material is grown or made.
A company can decarbonize what it owns, but most of its emissions belong to suppliers it does not control. Two forces are closing that gap. One is voluntary: the Science Based Targets initiative’s supplier-engagement target. The other is regulatory: the way the EU Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism prices the emissions embedded in imported inputs. Both push a company to measure and act on emissions it does not directly produce.
The SBTi gives companies three ways to set a Scope 3 target: cut absolute emissions, cut emissions intensity, or engage suppliers. The supplier-engagement target is the method of choice when granular supplier emissions data is scarce — which in agrifood is most of the time. The mechanics follow the GHG Protocol, in four steps:
| Step | What happens | The rule behind it |
|---|---|---|
| 1 · Build the Scope 3 inventory | Full value-chain inventory across the 15 GHG Protocol categories | Required when Scope 3 is ≥40% of the total footprint; target must cover ≥67% of Scope 3 |
| 2 · Select the suppliers | Rank by size, influence and risk — the largest contributors you can actually move | Engagement share is weighted by emissions, not by supplier count |
| 3 · Run the program | Clear expectations, data collection, capacity-building, incentives | For example: suppliers covering 70% of purchased-goods emissions |
| 4 · Track the share | Measure the proportion of engaged suppliers with credible SBTs by the stated year | The target is a share of suppliers setting targets — not a tonne of CO₂ |
What the target actually is
The target is not a tonne of CO₂; it is a share of suppliers, weighted by emissions, setting credible targets of their own.
For food manufacturers and paper companies, supplier engagement is where the footprint lives, not one option among several. The majority of their emissions are Scope 3, and most of that traces to land — the farms that grow ingredients and animal feed, and the forests that supply fibre. A food company’s largest carbon line is the agriculture behind its purchased products; a paper company’s is the forestry behind its pulp.
This is the same land-related Scope 3 that the SBTi Forest, Land and Agriculture standard covers, and it is why FLAG pairs an emissions target with a no-deforestation commitment that reaches up the supply chain. The levers — better farming practice, halting land conversion, protecting and restoring forest — sit with suppliers, not with the brand. Without engagement a food or pulp company cannot reach the bulk of its emissions, which makes a supplier program the central instrument of its decarbonization.
Your Scope 3 is farms and forests? We rank the suppliers worth engaging first.
See How →Fertilizer carries its upstream emissions differently — inside the chemistry of the product — and CBAM already puts a price on them. CBAM treats a fertilizer as a complex good, whose embedded emissions are the emissions of its own production plus the embedded emissions of its precursors. Around 80 percent of all ammonia is produced as a precursor for fertilizer.
Supplier engagement by another name
Under CBAM the exercise is mandatory, priced, and audited at the border. A producer that engages its precursor suppliers, or owns the ammonia step and decarbonizes it, lowers the embedded number that sets its CBAM bill.
Climate Decode builds the Scope 3 inventory, ranks the suppliers worth engaging first, and models the precursor roll-up that sets the CBAM number.
Whether the pressure comes from an SBTi target or a CBAM declaration, the requirement is the same: a company has to measure emissions it does not directly produce, find the suppliers and process steps that drive them, and act. TerraNova builds the inventory across all scopes, including the upstream and precursor emissions that dominate agrifood, and shows which suppliers and inputs carry the carbon.
For a food or pulp company, TerraNova ranks the suppliers worth engaging first and tracks their progress toward their own targets. For a fertilizer producer, it models the precursor roll-up that sets the CBAM number and the abatement that lowers it. The supplier program and the border declaration draw on the same underlying data, which is why the work to satisfy one largely satisfies the other.
The Sector Overview · SBTi FLAG for Agrifood · CBAM & Fertilizer
Notes and sources for the figures in this paper.
Climate Decode helps food, pulp and fertilizer companies measure and move the upstream emissions that dominate their footprint — for SBTi, and for the border.