Research and Campaign Leaders Explore Key Developments in Supply Chain Research

Anne Pernick, Special Projects Lead for Development and Research at Stand.earth

As the Stand.earth Research Group (SRG) was winding down 2025 and looking ahead to 2026, we realized there were a lot of developments in supply chain research that merited exploring.

Supply chain research powered important recent campaign successes, including a new commitment from Lululemon on energy and new insights into how Vietnam is being exploited as a hub for illegal wildlife trade. There also were shifts in data availability to explore and new regulations around the world affecting corporate data transparency and accountability. There were also new tools and approaches for accessing and analyzing data, including tools we’re using in our project, supported by a grant from the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation, to use graph databases and large language models for better insights and, ultimately, greater campaign impact. 

With all this in mind, SRG teamed up with other researchers and campaign colleagues to offer the Supply Chain Research Developments webinar on February 26.

We were honored to have people from over 20 organizations joining the live event.

It was my pleasure to facilitate the webinar (that’s me, upper row left), which featured these amazing speakers:

• Rachel Kitchin, Senior Corporate Climate Campaigner at Stand.earth on the Lululemon research and win (lower row left)
• Taylor Tench, Senior Wildlife Policy Analyst at the Environmental Investigation Agency US on wildlife trafficking linked to Vietnam and obtaining and analyzing data on the illegal trade in wildlife parts and products (upper row middle)
• Phoebe Lam, Operations Manager at Stand.earth Research Group on developments in supply chain transparency around the world and additional examples of data-driven progress on campaigns (upper row right)
• Rachel Friedman, Banting Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Victoria on voluntary sustainability commitments and transparency in the age of mandatory disclosure and due-diligence regulation – the case of coffee in Canada (lower row middle)
• Brian Orland, Research Associate of Stand.earth Research Group on the new project supported by a grant from the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation to create a graph database that can trace commodities from their source all the way to their destination (lower row right)

Thank you to our speakers and everyone who joined!