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This paper explains the evolving role of the local supply chain across different disruption scenarios. A systematic literature review of 91 papers from 33 journals supports definition of the local supply chain and explication of benefits before, during and after COVID-19 disruption. Resilience emerges as the prevalent benefit at each stage, but to varying scales. In the pre-COVID-19 era, where the local supply chain serves as a back-up approach to the more dominant global supply chain, localisation's capacity to absorb change promotes resilience to mitigate low-magnitude disruption. At initial outbreak of COVID-19 disruption the local supply chain was necessitated as an emergency response to the untenability of global operations, demonstrating transformational resilience to survive. As disruption continued, the local supply chain upscaled and adapted to recover. In the post-COVID-19 era, resilience is expected to remain a strategic priority, promoting continued investment in local operations to thrive with embedded resilience. As a result, the COVID-19 pandemic welcomed a point of transition for the local supply chain as capacities and benefits are revaluated and localisation recognised as critical in developing resilient supply networks for the future. This study consolidates this evolution to offer a propositional framework showcasing the local supply chain across different disruption scenarios. This offers long overdue definition and explanation of the local supply chain and its relationship with resilience, addressing an existing lack of academic attention and encouraging alignment of local-versus-global decisions with changing strategic priorities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The partisan divide over climate change issues in the U.S. has been increasing over time, particularly after the signing of the Kyoto protocol in 1997. This divide has posed a substantial hurdle to implementing a unified climate policy in the U.S. In this paper, I employ the Shapley value decomposition approach to measure the partisan gap in state-level per capita energy-related CO 2 emissions. Despite a decrease in overall carbon emissions and stable per capita carbon inequality between states (measured by the Gini index), the inequality between the so called 'red' and 'blue' states widened over the period between 1997 and 2021. This is true regardless of whether each state is treated as a unit of analysis or assigned a weight equal to its population. Throughout the period, the divide by political party color was more pronounced than that by many other dimensions, such as income, climatic condition, and geographic location. These results also hold true when Mean Log Deviation is used as the measure of inequality. Driven primarily by disparity in transportation sector and coal use for electricity generation, the partisan gap was worse in 2021 than in 2020. While the partisan gap intensified, the carbon distribution changed from being top-concentrated to bottom-concentrated between 1997 and 2019, only to be reversed in the aftermath of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020 and subsequent economic recovery in 2021. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

COVID–19 has disrupted human life considerably since the beginning of 2020. The transport sector is one of the most affected sector due to restrictions imposed to curb COVID–19 pandemic. This paper evaluates the environmental impacts of COVID–19 response scenarios using life cycle assessment approach. Six regions selected for the study are Australia, China, European Union (EU), India, United Kingdom (UK), and United States of America (USA). Data for vehicle population, vehicle kilometers travelled, fleet type, and fuel efficiency were used for 2015–2020. The environmental impacts were calculated for five scenarios; Baseline–2019, Business As Usual (BAU) and COVID–19 Response Scenario (CRS) for 2020 and 2030 namely, 2020–BAU, 2020–CRS, 2030–BAU, and 2030–CRS. The results indicate that COVID–19 occurrence and related response measures did not contribute to significant environment benefits in terms of Global Warming Potential (GWP) and other pollutants in short term and long term. This implies that although immediate reductions in emissions were observed in many studies, the long term effects were minimal due to irregular policies and unmanaged demand. Further, to achieve environment benefits sustained measures should be implemented in long term with proper planning and supporting infrastructure. Although electric vehicle strategies will provide benefits; emphasis on vehicle production and fuel production technologies is also needed to achieve the emission reduction targets. The findings are relevant for policy makers while devising policies to achieve the targets. • Vehicle stock will grow significantly in 2030 for developing countries • China's 2030 transport sector GWP will be highest, 1772 MT CO 2 eq, surpassing USA • Only USA showed reductions for all pollutants in 2030 COVID-19 response scenario • All countries had similar trends for most pollutants at different life cycle stages • COVID–19 occurrence didn't contribute to significant benefits in short & long term [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite several research evaluating the connection between sustainability and the bottom line of firms, the existing research is inconclusive. In addition, most studies focus on multinational firms based in the United States or Europe, while research in the context of emerging economies is scant. This paper endeavours to investigate the strength of the association between Environment, Social and Governance (ESG) disclosure scores and the financial performance of 272 Indian firms listed on National Stock Exchange for the period 2015 to 2021 by employing panel data regression techniques. The results indicate that organisations having better ESG performance outperform their industry peers financially and are valued more by the market. Moreover, the data indicates that financial markets for lenders consider ESG disclosure when determining creditworthiness. In accordance with this, businesses can examine their operations and become more aligned with eco-friendly methods. Even though ESG disclosure appears to be associated with improved financial success, this is not the case across all industries and during COVID-19 pandemic. This study is relevant due to the growing significance of sustainability and the role of emerging nations in international commerce. It helps managers prioritize resource allocations to ESG-related activities that may affect financial performance differently across industry sectors, thus adding to the literature on the financial effects of ESG disclosures, particularly industry-specific aspects. This research represents a pioneering effort by assessing the impact of ESG disclosure on the profitability, market value, and cost of financing of Indian firms using both aggregation and disaggregation methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The covid-19 pandemic has shown how an unpredictable event may affect the sustainability of the entire food supply chain highlighting the need for a sustainable approach to food logistics. While existing literature has focused on production and consumption, little attention has been paid to measuring social sustainability in food transportation. This is a critical gap, as transportation plays a vital role in ensuring the timely and safe delivery of food. This paper proposes a novel approach to measure social sustainability in the context of food logistics within a South European food processing company. The focus is on assessing social procurement practices at the level of logistics suppliers. The methodology developed is based on two levels, seven dimensions, and twenty-one food logistics social sustainability indicators. To validate this, the methodology is adopted to assess the social procurement of five food logistics suppliers (FLS) of a European food company and found significant variations in performance across different dimensions. The results suggest that the dimension in which suppliers perform well are: "characteristics and work welfare", "health of employees", and "human rights implementation and integration". On the other hand, the dimensions that score lowest for all suppliers are "diversity and equal opportunities", "external stakeholder community capital", and "innovation practices". The strength of this methodology lies in its ability to quantify social sustainability in food logistics and its practical implementation within the food logistics company, as well as among its logistics suppliers, in terms of social procurement. The results offer valuable insights and suggestions for the case study food company to improve their consideration of social sustainability aspects in a more comprehensive and effective manner throughout their business operations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The efficient distribution and timely vaccine delivery to the masses during any pandemic situation require reliable and efficient vaccine cold chain management (VCCM). Therefore, the present study is an effort to explore the factors of VCCM to develop a sustainable and resilient healthcare delivery system in any health outbreak. The factors of VCCM are scrutinized using Fuzzy-Delphi method and then prioritized adopting Fuzzy-Analytical Hierarchy Process (F-AHP) approach while considering the stakeholders' inputs. Finally, factors are categorized into clusters by implementing a machine learning tool ' k -means clustering' algorithm. The results of the study are further validated by conducting extended robustness tests. The findings of the study highlight the factors, namely, cold chain infrastructure, vaccine storage guidelines and availability of skilled professionals as the most important for VCCM. The ′ k -means clustering' algorithm analysis classifies all the 16 factors into three clusters: continuous process improvement (including eight factors), stakeholders' coordination (five factors) and maximum resource utility (three factors). The study can be significantly useful to VCCM decision-makers to implement the prioritized factors by ensuring the advanced cold chain infrastructure and issuing special storage and distribution guidelines to fight against health outbreaks like COVID-19. This is one of the few papers to discuss the factors of VCCM for developing a sustainable and resilient healthcare delivery system in the context of pandemics and stakeholders can address the factors in different clusters at a time. [Display omitted] • Vaccine cold chain management (VCCM) to develop a resilient healthcare delivery system during health outbreaks. • Prioritization of factors of VCCM using Fuzzy-Analytic Hierarchy Process approach. • Categorization of factors of VCCM by implementing a machine learning tool of K − m e a n s clustering algorithm. • Storage and distribution guidelines to fight against the COVID-19 outbreak. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]