The annual BSR Conference is taking place next month in New York City, bringing together business and NGO thought leaders to talk about real-world ways that companies are addressing a number of sustainability challenges.

In advance of the event, I interviewed Ryan Schuchard, BSR's manager of Research and Innovation (and a regular GreenBiz.com contributor), about the supply chain energy management panel he will be moderating next month.

Matthew Wheeland: Your first session at the BSR Conference, starting November 3 in New York City, is entitled "Supply Chain Energy Innovation." What will you be covering in your panel?

Ryan Schuchard: We are seeing more and more often that companies are going beyond their own operations to manage the environmental impacts of their supply chains. [Editor's note: For more details on this, see for example Ryan's recent article on Scope 3 emissions in the latest CDP report.]

At the same time, there are a number of new standards in the works for supply chain management, like the GHG Protocol's Scope 3 Initiative; companies that have already begun getting systems in place to manage the energy used in their supply chains will be at a competitive advantage when these standards are finalized and become more widely adopted.

For our session at the conference, we'll take a look at these emerging standards, and talk with some of the companies and suppliers that are already working on supply chain energy management and can offer tips on getting started and lessons learned from their experiences.

MW: Who else will be on the panel with you?

RS: Also on the panel is Bruce Bergstron, the vice president of vendor compliance at Li & Fung. He is also a co-founder of our Energy Efficiency Partnership in China, and he'll give his view from Hong Kong and discuss why energy matters in and around China, especially in light of the recent power restrictions the country is implementing to meet its energy efficiency targets.

Ken Lanshe launched and oversees Walmart's 300+-supplier energy initiative in China, and he'll talk about some of the challenges to creating large-scale supplier trainings and some tips on overcoming those challenges.

Jay Celorie, Hewlett-Packard's Global Program Manager for supply chain energy, is also going to be on the panel, discussing how to effectively engage suppliers, as well as how to think about data efficiency and integrity issues. As a co-leader of the Electronic Industry Citizenship Coalition's supplier carbon reporting system, Jay has a uniquely grounded view on the potential for propagating data management up and around the supply chain.

And Pankaj Bhatia, who is the director of the World Resources Institute's GHG Protocol Initiative, will give us an overview of the group's Scope 3 protocol work.

MW: When we hear companies talk about supply chain management from a sustainability standpoint, it's more often about carbon footprinting and product impacts. What efforts are you seeing companies undertake around managing the energy in their supply chains?

RS: There are a number of areas where companies are working, but the ones that first come to mind are introducing suppliers to climate or greenhouse gas management by using practical energy management techniques. They're also training and helping suppliers to develop energy management capabilities, and inviting them to share data about their impacts and lessons for corporate climate and CSR reporting.