Humanitarian Logistics In China: Evolution, Challenges And Solutions

Along with the rapid development of modern industry and the acceleration of urbanization, man-made harms to environment are becoming more and more serious. In recent years, there are more and more natural and man-made disasters and their influences are much more important than before. Only in the first half year of 2010, a lot of disasters have happened, like Haiti earthquake, Chili earthquake, forest fire in Russia, and seism in Gansu province of China. All of these disasters call for more rapid, stable and effective disaster management. Humanitarian logistics, which emphasizes 'humanity' and which is operated by Non Governmental Organizations, is the key to disaster rescue. Since it was defined in 2004 as another academic system different from commercial logistics and emergency logistics, research regarding this topic has begun and has gained initial success. However in China, its research has not begun.Disasters, especially natural disasters, frequently baptize China. The death toll of 5.12 Wen chuan earthquake has reached 69142. After this earthquake, operations of national and mutli-national Non Governmental Organizations during the disaster is broadly acknowledged but there are still a lot of issues and problems. Therefore, Non Governmental Organizations should learn to establish stable, resilient and agile humanitarian supply chain. In order to study the 'how', the 'what' should firstly be known. What are the issues and challenges of humanitarian logistics faced in China? Among these issues, which ones are the most urgent? Then solutions could be proposed.This paper firstly identified issues and challenges of humanitarian logistics in China based on China's macro environment. In the first half part, based on an analysis of humanitarian logistics' current research situation both in and abroad, we define, analyze and introduce respectively humanitarian logistics in disaster relief, differences and similarities between humanitarian logistics and commercial logistics and operational environment of humanitarian logistics in China, including NGOs' situation. Then, this paper has identified issues and challenges of humanitarian logistics in China from four points of view combined with disaster lifecycle:input/output environment, regulatory environment, competitive environment and internal stakeholders, based on conceptual models to identify humanitarian logistics issues and humanitarian logistics stakeholders. Afterwards factor analysis is applied to NGO survey data. At last we find that there are five significant factors which influence humanitarian logistics operation efficiency:infrastructure vulnerability, lack of cooperation, difficult to get real demand information, underestimate logistics and lack of logistics experts in the field. It is recommended that several measured could be taken to mitigate these problems:purchase NGO service, encourage routine social donation, encourage NGO participation in disaster rescue, integrate logistics infrastructure into disaster relief, create communication mechanisms among NGOs, invest in standardized training and certification, focus on structured process of continuous improvement and invest in logistics information systems.Research of this paper could open a new subject in disaster management in China, and could be consulted by other humanitarian logistics researchers during their research in the future.