Sustainability orientation and focus in logistics and supply chains

Abstract

Sustainable development, logistics, and supply chain are being combined into three increasingly connected and topical global research areas. Therefore, this paper’s novelty identifies and defines the priorities of the UN Sustainable Development Goals and sustainable development dimensions in supply‐chain‐ and logistics‐management‐related studies in the last decade. Knowing logistics and supply chain sustainability focus and orientation is valuable information for researchers and managers to adapt and mitigate their business logistics according to the forecasted trends. The paper provides a systematic and comprehensive review of the literature and is based on 116 scientific papers published between 2010 and 2020 in 73 international journals in the Scopus and Web of Science databases. The study defines focus with integrating environmental, social, and economic sustainability for logistics‐ and supply‐chain‐related studies. It emphasizes primary and secondary links of investigated studies with 17 United Nations sustainable development goals. The bibliometric analysis also examined keyword relations. One of the main contributions is that economic sustainability was identified as the most represented one‐dimensional sustainability focus. It was revealed that supply chain studies integrated all three sustainability dimensions more frequently (50.60%) than logistics studies, which were equally related to studying two‐ or three-dimensions of sustainability (39.39%). The most significant findings are also that studies were identified to be oriented primarily towards “responsible consumption and production”, “industry, innovation, and infrastructure” and “affordable and clean energy” and secondary especially on “sustainable cities and communities”.