Disasters’ impact on supply chains and countermeasure strategies: an overview of the academic literature’ nature

Abstract

Goal: This paper investigates the nature of the academic literature on the disasters’ impacts on Supply Chains (SC) and the strategies adopted to minimize their adverse effects.
 Design / Methodology / Approach: Based on a Systematic Literature Review (SLR), we conduct a bibliometric analysis of 129 documents to assess the significant publications’ characteristics regarding year, trend topics, journals, authors, papers more cited, keywords co-occurrence, disasters, SC type, and preliminary identification of disasters’ impacts and countermeasure strategies. 
 Results: The results show that most studies address natural disasters (e.g., floods, earthquakes, pandemics), and a significant number of documents refer to the food SC. Our findings indicate that the main impacts are: SC instability, supplies shortages, transport and distribution disruption, production and operation disruption, cash flow problems, and productivity reduction; and the main strategies: agility, the collaboration between SC links, organizational flexibility, information sharing, financial and inventory management, digital transformation, government policies, and benchmarking.
 Limitations of the investigation: This is a qualitative study with a preliminary examination of the topic through bibliometric results, and for this reason, the content analysis of the documents is outside the scope of the paper.
 Practical implications: The findings of this study provide preliminary insights for SC practitioners into the main countermeasures strategies performed to respond to the SC impacts during a disaster.
 Originality / Value: The results contribute to a holistic perspective of the topic, which involves the main features of existing studies in the literature.

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“…company's inability to match demand and supply" (Hendricks et al, 2005). Disruptions in supply chains can result from a variety of causes: climate change or natural disasters (e.g., floods, earthquakes, hurricanes, epidemics) (Ghosh & Sanyal, 2021;Moosavi et al, 2022) or human factors (e.g., wars, tariffs on specific products, economic crises, on specific products, economic crises) (Villalón-Huerta et al, 2022;Sarkar & Shankar, 2021) , the inevitable consequence of which is the disruption of the normal flow of materials and information within supply chains (Cardoso et al, 2022). Events such as a pandemic or war bring unexpected challenges such as demand and supply shocks resulting in stockpiling, labor shortages, restriction of transportation primarily across borders (Nikolopoulos et al, 2021).…”

The effects of supply chain viability on supply chain performance and marketing performance in case of large manufacturing firm in Ethiopia

“…The demand for facial masks, hand sanitizer, and disinfectant sprays skyrocketed during the coronavirus, and the supply side couldn't keep up; as a result, commercial and societal survival concerns arose (Ivanov, 2020b). Besides its impact on SC activities, Cardoso et al, (2022) indicates that the COVID-19 pandemic also had significant social challenges (e.g., food insecurity).…”