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Papers from the 18th NOFOMA conference held in Oslo, Norway, 2006. Marianne Jahre and Gøran Persson
1 Introduction
As a result of the Asian tsunamis in 2004, humanitarian logistics has received increasing interest both from logistics academics as well as practitioners. Humanitarian logistics is an umbrella term for a mixed array of operations. It covers disaster relief as well as continuous support for developing regions. Unfortunately disaster relief will continue to expand market, as it is forecasted that over the next 50 years, both natural and man-made disasters[1] will increase five-fold ([48] Thomas and Kopczak, 2005). Delivering humanitarian aid can, therefore, be seen as a substantial global industry. According to [31] Long and Wood (1995), food relief alone accounted for $5 billion worth of food in 1991; which has important consequences for the world's agricultural and transportation industries. In addition, [31] Long and Wood (1995) estimated the number of major relief agencies at over 100 in 1995, with each of them managing annual budgets of over $1 million. In 2004, the combined budgets of the top ten aid agencies exceeded 14 billion dollars ([48] Thomas and Kopczak, 2005). Also, almost every government in the world is involved as either a donor or recipient of relief operations ([31] Long and Wood, 1995).
Logistics has always been an important factor in humanitarian aid operations, to the extent that logistics efforts account for 80 percent of disaster relief ([51] Trunick, 2005b). The speed of humanitarian aid after a disaster depends "on the ability of logisticians to procure, transport and receive supplies at the site of a humanitarian relief effort" ([47] Thomas, 2003, p. 4). But disaster relief operations struggle with very special circumstances. They often have to be carried out in an environment with destabilized infrastructures ([10] Cassidy, 2003; [31] Long and Wood, 1995) ranging from a lack of electricity supplies to limited transport infrastructure. Furthermore, since most natural disasters are unpredictable, the demand for goods in these disasters is also unpredictable ([10] Cassidy, 2003; [37] Murray, 2005). Therefore, a set of characteristics can be identified that sets humanitarian logistics apart from business logistics.
The focus of this paper is on discovering and describing the unique characteristics of humanitarian logistics in disaster relief operations. The paper aims to...