Carbon management in the logistics and transportation sector: an overview and new research directions

Abstract

While many studies have addressed the issue of environmental sustainability within the supply chain as a whole, so far no attempt has been made to specifically investigate the current status of carbon management issues in the logistics and freight transportation sector. This paper aims to fill this gap by providing a systematic literature review of publications in the area of carbon management in the logistics and transportation sector between the years 2000 and 2015. The review provides insight into the critical themes and challenges of carbon management in the logistics and transportation sector according to five identified key topics: carbon strategy, carbon risk assessments, carbon target setting, carbon reduction initiatives, and carbon performance and reporting. The results show that, although an increase in carbon management practices in logistics and transportation can be observed, only carbon reduction initiatives have been extensively discussed in the literature. In particular, carbon performance and carbon reporting are highly under researched and provide an opportunity for further study. As such, this paper highlights and discusses the identified gaps in the literature and proposes specific recommendations for future research into the logistics and transportation sector.

Keywords

• carbon management
• carbon reduction
• logistics
• transportation
• environmental sustainability