Climate risk erosion of firms’ supply chain network positions: environmental management dilemmas and resilience trade-offs

A firm’s position in a supply chain network shapes its ability to access resources, control information, and diversify risks, thereby influencing its competitive advantage. As climate change intensifies, once climate risk is recognized and enters the managerial agenda, it may trigger the contraction and reconfiguration of supply chain relationships, altering the firm’s relative position in the network. Integrating social network theory with the attention‑based view and threat‑rigidity theory, this study constructs a text‑based measure capturing whether climate risk is “discussed and attended to” at the firm level. Using a sample of Chinese A‑share listed firms from 2013 to 2023, we examine the impact of climate risk on supply chain network positions and its boundary conditions. The findings show that climate risk significantly erodes firms’ network position advantages. This effect is more pronounced among firms with higher environmental performance, stronger trade credit, and greater analyst coverage. The results point to a “resilience trade‑off”: under heightened climate risk, factors typically associated with resilience can instead intensify position erosion through mechanisms such as deepening institutional rigidity, credit relational lock-in, and external pressure amplification. Theoretically, this study moves the climate‑risk literature beyond functional outcomes to firms’ structural embeddedness in supply chain networks, replaces an exposure‑based view with a managerial‑agenda perspective in measuring climate risk, and clarifies a resilience trade-off mechanism whereby conventional resilience factors can, under climate‑risk pressures, inadvertently heighten network vulnerability. Practically, the findings guide firms to integrate climate‑risk management with managerial objectives and network reconfiguration, encourage supply chains to build collaborative governance and risk‑buffering mechanisms and inform policymakers in emerging economies to design coordinated governance and incentives that jointly enhance supply‑chain climate resilience and industrial‑chain security.