Sustainability in Humanitarian Logistics - Why and How?

Sustainability in Humanitarian Logistics - Why and How?

Matthias Klumpp, Sander de Leeuw, Alberto Regattieri and Robert de Souza

Abstract Concepts in humanitarian logistics have been a field of increasing
interest as well as research and publication activities in the last decade, especially
triggered by the response and logistics failures of the 2004 Haiti earthquake. Since
then, many things have changed, inside humanitarian organizations (NGOs) with
more professional logistics management and preparedness concepts as well as
within government organizations, namely the UN organizations with the OCHA
coordination effort in order to improve global alignment of humanitarian logistics
assets and processes. Also, logistics research has contributed largely to the new
professional development of humanitarian logistics, i.e. by transferring and
adapting concepts from business logistics to the humanitarian sector or applying
many field and case studies in order to understand the specific requirements and
conditions in the field better.



M. Klumpp (&)
Institute for Logistics and Service Management, FOM University of Applied Sciences,
Essen, Germany

e-mail: matthias.klumpp@fom-ild.de
S. de Leeuw

Department of Information, Logistics and Innovation, VU University Amsterdam,
Amsterdam, The Netherlands

e-mail: sander.de.leeuw@vu.nl

S. de Leeuw
Nottingham Business School, Nottigham Trent University, Nottingham, UK
A. Regattieri
Department of Industrial Engineering, University of Bologna, Bologna, Italy
e-mail: alberto.regattieri@unibo.it
R. de Souza
The Logistics Institute Asia Pacific, National University of Singapore,
Singapore, Singapore
e-mail: rdesouza@nus.edu.sg
© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2015
M. Klumpp et al. (eds.), Humanitarian Logistics and Sustainability,
Lecture Notes in Logistics,

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-15455-8_1

Background

Concepts in humanitarian logistics have been a field of increasing interest as well as
research and publication activities in the last decade, especially triggered by the
response and logistics failures of the 2004 Haiti earthquake. Since then, many things
have changed, inside humanitarian organizations (NGOs) with more professional
logistics management and preparedness concepts as well as within government
organizations, namely the UN organizations with the OCHA coordination effort in
order to improve global alignment of humanitarian logistics assets and processes.
Also, logistics research has contributed largely to the new professional development
of humanitarian logistics, i.e. by transferring and adapting concepts from business
logistics to the humanitarian sector or applying many field and case studies in order to
understand the specific requirements and conditions in the field better.

This also led to many workshops and fairs as well as conferences where the
actors met, among them also the FOM ild International Workshop on Humanitarian
Logistics, with the first event taking place in 2011 in Essen, summing up a status
quo of the international humanitarian logistics sector. In 2012 the subsequent
second workshop dealt with performance measurement and the third workshop in
2013 brought the topic of sustainability in humanitarian logistics into the headlights,
building the basis for this book.

Further workshops will be held in Essen/Germany with the support from FOM
University of Applied Sciences as well as many partners and the renowned research
cluster “EffizienzCluster LogistikRuhr”, the largest logistics research cluster in
Europe, located in the German Ruhr area. From these research endeavors also stems
the cooperation of the editors for this book, bringing together logistics researchers
from the Netherlands (VU University), Italy (University of Bologna), Singapore
(National University of Singapore) and Germany (University of Duisburg-Essen,
FOM University of Applied Sciences Essen).

1.2 Why Sustainability?

Sustainability is an old concept but newly rediscovered and named phenomenon in
society and research: Whereas from the beginning of mankind human actions and
decisions had an impact on the environment and nature, only with the beginning of
civilized structures and the connected number of people had these impacts longterm
consequences and also negative effects on humans themselves: When the
Romans in the first millennium B.C. for example used all the available wood in
Italy for ship building above the sustainable rate of cutting down forest in the
Apennine mountains, they experienced the first—still locally restricted—climate
change with more arid and less fertile climate results.

Since then climate and environment impacts and changes have been a normal
question of the relationship of mankind with nature, sometimes leading to mass
migration or other results in societies. But since the 18th century a new development
took hold with the industrial revolution: On the one hand due to unprecedented
productivity increases in agriculture as well as in manufacturing, the number
of humans was able to grow enormously until the 7 billion people now inhabiting
planet earth. On the other hand, the use of carbon-based energy sources to fuel this
growth led to one of the first global and probably irreversible impact of human
actions to the ecosystem: The experienced and predicted climate change due to the
global increase of carbon dioxide levels in the air.

Quite fittingly, the modern understanding of sustainability as a concept was also
propagated in the 18th century by Hans Carl von Carlowitz, a German agriculture and
forest scientist, defining the sustainable concept for wood cutting 1713 for the first
time with the words “Wird derhalben die größte Wissenschaft und Einrichtung hiesiger
Lande darinnen beruhen, wie eine sothane Conservation und Anbau des Holtzes
anzustellen, daß es eine continuierliche beständige und nachhaltende [“sustainable”]
Nutzung gebe, weiln es eine unentberliche Sache ist ohne welche das Land in seinem
Esse nicht bleiben mag” (Sylvicultura Oeconomica, p. 105–106).

This first principle was discussed in further research and publications and came
to public notice on a global scale for the first time during the 1970s with the 1972
‘Club of Rome’ report Limits of Growth and led to the 1987 UN Brundtland-Report
Our Common Future with the modern-day definition of sustainability: “Sustainable
development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising
the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” (p. 54).

Today this concept is meant to be applied to all areas of society, therefore also to
the field of humanitarian logistics—with the special interest of all the humanitarian
actors also to mitigate or even to avoid future disasters in the wake of climate
change and therefore strive for sustainability on its own account. In this sense, this
contributed book was put together in order to provide a first overview of sustainability
concepts in all humanitarian logistics processes and areas as well as field for
further research and development in the understanding of a guiding light for further
research processes.

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