An empirical study of the resilience in Austrian wood transport

Abstract

Wood supply chains are massively threatened by climate change impacts, leading to more frequent and severe forest calamities. Improving the resilience of wood supply chains requires enhanced knowledge about the structure, critical indicators, and challenges of the transport system. Consequently, a comprehensive empirical study of wood transport was conducted in Austria. Stakeholders of the entire wood supply chain participated in an online survey, focus interviews, case studies, and data collection, enabling both qualitative and quantitative analyses. A critical decline in future trucking capacity driven by an adverse age structure of drivers, a significant lack of new job trainees, and an unbalanced share of unimodal truck transport were detected as critical issues jeopardizing resilience. Stakeholders of the supply chain assessed promising coping strategies, such as increasing the modal share of multimodal and multi-echelon unimodal wood transport, enhancing working conditions of self-loading log truck drivers, exploiting digitalization, providing additional storage, and deepening cooperation. Presented learnings and improvement potentials in cooperation between forest owners, transport operators, and industry are highly relevant for supply chains worldwide to reduce common bottlenecks of truck transport, storage, handling, and take-over capacities. Management and policy implications improving wood transport resilience and increasing transport capacity through investment in railroad and terminal infrastructure, raising legal maximum gross vehicle weights, improving the availability of specific rail wagons, and enhancing wood storage capacities proved to be of utmost significance. Future emphasis on research regarding best practices to cope with salvage wood crises, as well as quantitative benchmarks based on the introduced resilience definition and indicators, is strongly recommended.