Greening of humanitarian supply chain with focus on logistics

Abstract

Natural disasters and the conventional responses to the disasters disturb the environment and all the living and non-living things surround it. By both scenarios, disaster and logistical response, environment is further damaged as bulk of carbon emissions add up to the already fragile environmental health. This research explores the issues due to natural disasters and the response to these disasters, and to make the humanitarian logistics green so that further damage could be reduced. Since there exists a low quantity of literature regarding a green or sustainable humanitarian logistics, for the sake of comparison, the method of introduction of sustainable concepts in commercial logistics has been highlighted. Those very concepts which have common grounds with humanitarian logistics have been borrowed, restructured, and introduced particularly considering the constraints and resource availability faced during humanitarian operations. Debatable points have been extracted from the review of literature, organised into hypotheses, tested through the collection of data, and analysed through ANOVA. The major findings suggested to decrease the vehicle load volume which would result in an increase of vehicle fill-rate, and correspondingly less damage would be done to the environment due to the logistics.