Sustainable Logistics and Environmental Protection

Dear Colleagues,

Societies around the globe are increasingly noticing the effects of climate change, including extreme weather conditions, droughts, the melting ice of glaciers, and rising sea levels. Among scientists, politicians, and the general populace, there is a broad consensus that anthropogenic greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions are a major contributor to global warming and that there is an urgent need to respond to the threat of climate change by limiting global temperature rise in the forthcoming years. Several studies indicate that logistics activities are influential sources of GHG. According to the World Economic Forum and Accenture, logistical activity accounts for about 5.5% of the global GHG emissions. In addition to the environmental impact, social aspects of sustainable logistics such as safety, health, and labor conditions of the organization’s employees and their supplier/partners across global supply chains also need to be considered.

This Special Issue aims to contribute to sustainable logistics by presenting innovative approaches and applications as well as empirical findings that promote the positive impact on the social and/or environmental dimensions of sustainability. This includes, e.g., research showing how transparency across logistics networks can be increased and negative environmental and social impacts in supply chains can be reduced.

Even though this Special Issue mainly focuses on the environmental dimension of sustainability, we also accept research that considers the social dimension by showing, for instance, approaches that increase the transparency across supply and value chains regarding social aspects.

There is no limitation to a specific research methodology, i.e., the presented research may be based on operations research, geospatial analysis (GIS), game theory, surveys, etc. The following list provides an illustrative set of topics and paper types suitable for this Special Issue but is far from exhaustive. Any questions about the suitability of a topic may be directed to the Special Issue guest editors.

• Novel approaches for increasing the transparency in GHG across logistics networks (measuring/assessing/accounting for GHG emissions);
• Innovative approaches for increasing transparency across supply chains regarding social aspects;
• Novel approaches for reducing GHG emissions across logistics networks and supply chains;
• Transport systems analyses with a focus on environmental aspects (air, maritime, land);
• Innovative data collection and processing approaches for the analysis of logistics systems and supply chains regarding sustainability aspects;
• Empirical papers/computational analyses;
• Real-world applications/case studies;
• Systematic literature reviews: this may cover the topics listed above, i.e., literature reviews on approaches for measuring, managing, and reducing GHG emissions in logistics networks, presentations of real-world applications/best practices, empirical studies, and so forth.

Dr. Florian Kellner
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Sustainability is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• sustainable logistics
• environmental protection
• green logistics
• sustainable supply chain management