Guest editorial: The COVID-19 impact on humanitarian operations: Lessons for future disrupting events

Shah, Bhavin; Frederico, Guilherme F; Kumar, Vikas; Garza-Reyes, Jose Arturo; Kumar, Anil

Abstract

During wide spread of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), it has been recorded that humankind played a responsive role in collaboration with societies, governing authorities and controlling agencies (Haque and Islam, 2018) while managing resources during man-made or natural disasters. Sufficient literature is being noticed focussing on humanitarian relief operations (Anparasan and Lejeune, 2017) and supply risk mitigations (Maghsoudi et al., 2018) incurred due to the disasters. However, the role of volunteers and the workforce in relief planning, and recovery for pandemic and complex emergencies have not been explored adequately (Harpring et al., 2021). Furthermore, it is necessary to bring out clarity on how the way of managing humanitarian operations services differ during pandemics, man-made and nature-inspired disasters. Models are developed to manage manpower and resources (Kebriyaii et al., 2021), vehicle capacities (Ershadi and Shemirani, 2021) and routing (Breitbarth et al., 2021) to protect and serve the vulnerable communities with essential supplies during pandemics. But, it raises the question whether existing logistical networks and infrastructures are enough to aid necessary supplies during these events.

• Journal Article Type: Editorial
• Acceptance Date: Jun 23, 2022
• Online Publication Date: Nov 21, 2022
• Publication Date: Nov 21, 2022
• Deposit Date: Jun 24, 2022
• Publicly Available Date: Dec 22, 2022
• Journal: Journal of Humanitarian Logistics and Supply Chain Management
• Print ISSN: 2042-6747
• Publisher: Emerald
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 12
• Issue: 4
• Pages: 473-481
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1108/JHLSCM-10-2022-132
• Public URL: https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/9659375
• Publisher URL: https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.1108/JHLSCM-10-2022-132/full/html