As agenda 2030 draws closer and pressure mounts on government and industry to measure their environmental impact, research from the University of Sydney reveals that many sustainability assessments are still missing a key part of the picture: the vast and often invisible impact of supply chains stretching beyond an organisation’s own four walls.
Working across two faculties at the University’s Business School and the Faculty of Science, Professor Arunima Malik spends her time considering this very conundrum, quantifying the environmental, social and economic impacts otherwise hidden within supply chains. She’s completed assessments for businesses, technologies, sectors, regions and even countries at different scales, working to understand what their supply chain impacts actually are. Her goal, is to provide a clearer view of where the impacts within the vast network of interconnections are actually coming from, and who is accountable for them. Her work is significant as the evolving climate-reporting landscape places growing emphasis on quantifying and disclosing Scope 3 emissions, bringing environmental impacts across broader value chains into sharper focus.
For Arunima, the biggest blind spot in how organisations, industries and even nations measure their sustainability performance comes down to data – or a lack thereof. "If we have more detailed information, we’d be able to get a more robust estimate of impacts embodied in supply chains," she says. "If we only have selected data points, then we have to make assumptions and fill the gaps using sector level information, which is very broad." What’s more, not every industry is willing to provide their financial information or share what’s needed. It’s in this visibility gap where the potential for real impact goes unnoticed. "There are hidden hotspots in supply chains, which really need to be quantified to understand where supply chains originate from," Arunima explains.
Conventional sustainability assessments struggle to close this gap. "Traditional sustainability assessments often focus on an organisation’s own operations, leaving much of the broader supply chain out of view. There is also a question of feasibility: is it really practical to engage with every supplier across an organisation’s entire supply chain?"
Instead, organisations need to identify where the most significant impacts and key hotspots are concentrated and use robust assessments to help prioritise where action will have the greatest impact. Arunima’s solution is to use models that combine different approaches. "Hybrid models that integrate data across different levels move beyond conventional assessment methods," she says. "These models provide a more complete and nuanced assessment, with greater specificity."
In 2018, Arunima used this approach to publish the very first study to quantify the carbon footprint of Australia’s healthcare system. Following that research, she received government funding to complete a New South Wales-based footprint assessment. "In that work we extended it to carbon, waste, and other impacts, such as water use impacts embodied in supply chains as well," she explains. These findings were featured in the sustainability statement produced by NSW Health. This research expanded further still into the Western New South Wales Local Health District, and beyond. A matching health system assessment followed for Western Australia, prompted by a growing understanding and recognition that while healthcare is fundamentally about improving lives, its environmental footprint cannot be overlooked.
Beyond the health system, Arunima has demonstrated how this technique can be applied to account for organisations’ supply chain impacts and across different scales, enabling questions such as: how sustainable are low-carbon technologies, really? “It’s about connecting the dots, engaging across the value chain, and focusing on the impacts that matter most for a sustainable future,” she adds.
It’s about connecting the dots, engaging across the value chain, and focusing on the impacts that matter most for a sustainable future.
The University of Sydney Business School
Beyond her work within the local and global health sector, Arunima’s research has focused on a range of economic sectors and regions, capturing interconnected nature of supply chains. In 2025, her work earned her the Frontiers Planet Prize, the largest prize given to an individual at the University for research on international trade and sustainable development goals. This win was born from an evident gap in how progress towards the UN’s Sustainable Development goals is measured. "We have these SDGs, which are very much territorial, and every country looks at their progress from a territorial lens," Arunima explains. "We measure what countries produce and what they emit, but we don't consider what they draw from the outside world – the SDGs don't take that into account either."
Beyond her work in academia, Arunima has also co-authored policy briefs with the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network on textile, food, and critical mineral supply chains, has written sustainability reports for Councils, and had her research cited by the World Bank, UN Trade and Environment, International Monetary Fund, and other international organisations.
While her research relies on high-performance computing to analyse global supply chains and large datasets, Arunima says the University's broader research capability is what enables it to succeed. "We have the facilities we need for assessing these impacts here at the University," she explains. "We have delivered on projects with councils, industry, government – there’s a reason why we’ve got this recurring engagement." What’s more, it’s the opportunity to collaborate, which is central to how Arunima and the Business School's Research Hubs make their impact. "It’s not just me at the Sustainable Business Hub – it is a broad community of researchers working to address the complex sustainability challenges facing businesses."
With Agenda 2030 around the corner, Arunima says the conversation is already shifting to what comes next regarding current gaps in SDGs and governance structures. One gap she’s determined to close is the near-total focus on carbon at the expense of nature itself. "We talk a lot about carbon emissions—and rightly so—but nature-based metrics broaden the lens to capture biodiversity impacts as well," she explains. "Nature needs equal footing and standing as carbon emissions have had over time."
For Arunima the work of making supply chains visible is far from finished, but the direction is clear. "Greater recognition is one of the many needs for supply chain sustainability assessments, and then the development of advanced techniques that can be applied for assessing impacts at high resolution," she concludes. This is something Arunima aims to continue exploring, at every scale and link in the chain.
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