Low Carbon Supply Chain

The project is aimed at developing a balanced green supply chain approach and system capable of providing an understanding of the impact of the green initiatives from a full supply chain perspective utilising an intrinsically multi-disciplinary approach, including contributions from sustainable science, social science, supply chain, engineering, environment, economies, energy, technology and policy work.

Key issues

• Why is a full supply chain analysis of energy efficiency and conservation fundamental to the understanding of the real impact of green initiatives?
• How may a sub-optimal approach to greening a supply chain detrimentally affect the potential for CO2 emissions reductions?
• How does a balanced approach work in greening a global supply chain under a conflicting multiple objectives scenario?
• What are the key decision variables and the trade-offs in the balanced approach?
• What are the roles of stakeholders and policy makers in greening a global supply chain?

Research issues addressed

• Critical assessment of mapping methodologies for Supply Chain.
• Development of GHG impact quantification methodologies for Supply Chain.
• Development of a balanced green supply chain model and Decision Support System for evaluating alternative green intervention scenarios on Supply Chains.
• Investigation of appropriate interventions (both in terms of green practices and clean and low carbon technologies) to optimise supply chain performance.
• Development of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for evaluating and capturing the performance of a supply chain from a sustainability point of view.

“We call for a better appreciation of urban green areas, not only as sites of an urban ecology, or as public space, but also as sites of social-ecological interaction where knowledge and learning about ecosystems takes place. Our contribution has been to provide conceptual tools like the scale-crossing broker to enrich academic and policy debates on how to handle cross-scale learning and adaptive ecosystem governance,” Ernstson and Barthel conclude.