International organizations such as International Maritime Organization (IMO), European Union (EU), and United National Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) have begun implementing regulations and guidelines for decarbonization of transportation, manufacturing, and logistics industries. The IMO's 2023 Greenhouse Gas (GHG) Strategy targets net-zero GHG emissions from international shipping by or around 2050. The EU has adopted the EU Emission Trading System (ETS), effective on 1 January 2024, and the FuelEU, effective on 1 January 2025. The above two organisations have driven stakeholders in maritime transportation and logistics toward net-zero pathways through regulatory and pricing measures. Meanwhile, the green shipping corridor (GSC) by the Clydebank Declaration at the 26th Conference of the Parties (COP26) to the UNFCCC has been initiated in November 2021, based on the IMO's regulations, the Paris Agreement, and others, aiming at decarbonizing the maritime industry.
Unlike the IMO and the EU, since COP29, GSC has aimed to integrate land and river transportation modes into sea transportation to achieve overall decarbonization of multimodal transport. In particular, major cargo owners, as one of ten stakeholders of GSC (e.g., Amazon, IKEA, Unilever, Walmart, BP Oil), have committed to transporting their cargoes by zero-emission vessels within the time frame announced. In addition, other stakeholders such as port authorities, shipbuilding companies, shipping companies, ship classification societies, central governments, green fuel producers, not to mention the IMO and the EU, have formed a coalition platform at every COP meeting to promote decarbonization at sea and a multimodal transport network.
As for maritime transportation and logistics and supply chain management, the rapid advancement in artificial intelligence (AI) and big data technologies has become a catalyst of digital transformation and driving force to accelerate convergence towards net-zero carbon emissions. The integration of AI and big data technologies can be applied for optimizing logistical operations and minimizing carbon footprints through real-time monitoring, demand forecasting, and route optimization to reduce fuel consumption and GHG emissions in logistics and transportation. These analytical capabilities allow organizations to improve the environmental performance and ensure that emission reductions can be realized through data-driven decision-making.
All stakeholders in the industries and governments have shifted from advocacy to setting up more targeted goals that they should achieve by the given time frame in the context of the net-zero paths. The stakeholders in the transport, logistics, and supply chain industries are facing three key challenges in implementing net-zero paths: challenges of higher capital costs (CAPEX) and higher operating costs (OPEX) to use green fuel energy in association with new vehicles and new technologies in the context of green transport and logistics chains model, and the need to establish sustainable green energy supply chains. To cope with them, the stakeholders in the industries and governments should seek key success factors in implementing it. Existing literature have not addressed these challenges in comprehensive and integrated approaches.
This Special Issue on Net-Zero Pathways in Logistics, Transportation, and Supply Chain Management aims to address not only reduction of direct emissions from transport operations, modal shift, use of alternative fuels, but also transformation of entire supply chains through AI-powered digitalization and adoption of new technologies. This SI contributes to exploring how to enable the logistics and transportation industries to achieve carbon reduction in their supply chains and multimodal transportation network and how to adopt AI and big data technologies and pricing and incentivization policies to support decarbonization technology adoption. The findings in the SI contributes to providing research community and practitioners in transport, logistics and supply chains with managerial and policy insights and expanding literature of net-zero pathways in logistics, transportation, and supply chain management.