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.