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1. Introduction
Faced with the constant pressures of a highly competitive global market, companies are forced to look for new ways to improve their business. One of the areas of business that offers the most room for optimization and gaining a competitive advantage is a sustainable supply chain. With the emergence and development of the circular economy (CE) concept, one of the most promising ways to achieve sustainability is the transformation of conventional supply chains into circular supply chains (CSC) (Sudusinghe and Seuring, 2021).
World population growth, changes in lifestyle, development of consumer society and increasing awareness of healthy eating have led to significant changes in the global food market. One of the most significant changes is the exponential growth in the demand for food, and the agri-food sector plays a key role in meeting that demand (Sudusinghe and Seuring, 2021). It achieves this through the planning, development and implementation of efficient supply chains in which CE plays a key role as a concept that enables the highest level of utilization of existing resources while reducing unnecessary waste and all negative environmental impacts of logistics, primarily transport, such as emissions of gases and particles (Yazdani et al., 2019). In recent years, natural disasters, pandemics (such as COVID-19), political unrest, wars and other shocks have pointed out the great vulnerability of global supply chains. The consequences of these risks are particularly visible in the agri-food sector, where the production and supply of essential agricultural and food products can significantly threaten the implementation of CSCs. The way to overcome these threats is adequate risk management, but before that, it is necessary to adequately identify and analyze them. Thus, the focus of this paper is on the risks that can affect CSCs, not only in terms of achieving circularity goals, but also in achieving general goals of supply chains. This problem is investigated in this paper for the case of agri-food circular supply chains.
The goal of the paper is the identification, evaluation and ranking of risks in order to single out those that should be focused on when predicting, preventing, mitigating or eliminating its consequences, that is, those that can be managed most effectively. As the identified risks can be evaluated in relation to multiple criteria,...