The main theme of this year’s forum was the “Local vs. Global Sustainability Debate”, including social, environmental and economic sustainability issues.
The programme featured discussions on many topics, including sustainability concepts within product development and innovation; green supply chain management; socially responsible sourcing; information disclosure and transparent sustainability reporting; as well as the economic, social and environmental dimensions of the triple bottom line.
“We have learnt a lot from the efforts of supply chain sustainability reporting, such as the work conducted by The Sustainability Consortium, or Sustainable Apparel Coalition - And the major learning is, we know so little, and the business needs help.” said Lingxuan Liu during the plenary talk.
“Transparency is a hot topic in and out of this forum, but there are two layers of transparency issues. In some cases, business understands most of its supply chains, but considered the data as confidential. Thus the key of disclosure is ‘who is asking for the information, in what format, and for what?’
"In other cases and probably most cases, business only understands part of its suppliers, and knows almost nothing about upper stream, e.g. Tie-2 or 3. Both scenarios require a pre-competitive scenario and multi-stakeholder collaboration, to solve the transparency challenge. Pentland Centre can play such a role by bringing science and business together, and create or facilitate the solution.”