Painting of the Sustainable Humanitarian Cold Chain

Purpose: Humanitarian cold chains are especially vulnerable to disruptions that result from climate events. In addition, humanitarian cold chains have a negative impact on the environment. Sustainable practices and processes are one approach to overcome those disruptions whilst adapting to global warming, making humanitarian cold chains more resilient. However, sustainability and resilience are sometimes perceived as mutually exclusive, creating a bottleneck between keeping the chain both cold and green. Using Panarchy theory, this article aims to describe the sustainability narrative of humanitarian cold chains through resilience thinking and through outlier events at different panarchical levels
Design/methodology/approach: With qualitative analysis from a focus-group study, this research argues the identified outlier events prompt the change towards including sustainable practices in humanitarian cold chains. However, the change will not materialize if a traditional interpretation of resilience as static and robust is upheld.
Findings: Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Covid-19, and Climate and Environment Charter are amongst the biggest events which have triggered humanitarian organizations to rethink their sustainability practices. Fundamental changes in humanitarian cold chain designs, however, have not happened, partly due to the way they are viewed: as closed and rigid systems. More advocacy from academia and practice is called for to rethink resilience and sustainability as mutually inclusive to promote a true change toward sustainability.
Origin/value: This research constitutes one of the first attempts to apply panarchy theory to the humanitarian logistics discipline. Findings demonstrate the need to rethink the concept of resilience in order to include more sustainable practices in humanitarian cold chains.