The US Navy will ask its 100 largest suppliers to disclose their greenhouse gas emissions, as well as strategies for cutting them, via CDP (formerly Carbon Disclosure Project).
The US military is the world’s largest fossil fuels user with the Navy and Marines representing a third of that use.
The US Navy has also set a goal that by 2020, 50 percent of its total energy consumption will come from alternative sources.
“Energy can be used as a weapon, and I simply didn’t want that weapon to be used against us,” secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus told a CDP conference of companies, investors, nonprofits and tech industry representatives at Google’s Sunnyvale, California, campus on April 12th. “By switching to alternative energy, we can take ourselves off the grid in case something happens and continue to do the Navy’s job.”
CDP’s supply chain program helps 89 global purchasers — including major US brands like Coca-Cola, Walmart and General Motors — that spend more than $2.7 trillion annually, engage more than 8,200 key suppliers on climate change disclosure. CDP says understanding how climate change can impact and potentially weaken supply chains, and how they can future-proof themselves against the associated risks is the driving factor behind these organizations’ participation.
The Navy participation in CDP follows the lead of the US federal government’s largest procurer of goods and services, the US General Services Administration, which began utilizing the CDP supply chain disclosure platform last year.
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