Sustainable Supply Chain Management: Innovation, Cross-Tier Integration, and System-Wide Transformation

Dear Colleagues,

Global supply chains face growing pressure from climate change, resource scarcity, decarbonization targets, social inequalities, geopolitical disruptions, and stringent stakeholder and regulatory requirements. Meanwhile, advances in artificial intelligence, digital traceability, data analytics, and low-carbon technologies are reshaping sustainability measurement and management across supply-chain tiers. Addressing these challenges requires integrated systems that balance environmental protection, social responsibility, and long-term economic viability across products, processes, tiers, and regions. Yet technological and organizational innovations may create trade-offs, implementation barriers, data-quality concerns, and governance risks. This Special Issue examines how technological, organizational, and policy innovations can be coordinated across supply-chain functions and tiers to generate measurable system-wide sustainability gains rather than isolated local improvements.

This Special Issue aims to advance the integration of sustainability principles across supply-chain functions, tiers, and stakeholder groups while fostering innovation, collaboration, and long-term value creation. It seeks to explore strategies, technologies, business models, and governance practices that enable supply chains to become environmentally responsible, socially equitable, economically viable, digitally enabled, and resilient. By emphasizing innovation, cross-tier integration, and system-wide transformation, the Special Issue aims to strengthen sustainability performance, resilience, competitiveness, and value creation throughout the supply network. We welcome conceptual and review articles, as well as empirical, analytical, optimization-based, data-driven, case-based, and mixed-method studies that offer clear theoretical contributions and practical implications for management or policy.

This Special Issue seeks to explore a wide range of topics, including but not limited to the following:

• Sustainable procurement and responsible sourcing.
• Supplier development and sustainability collaboration.
• Sustainable manufacturing and operations.
• Sustainable product design and life-cycle assessment.
• Green logistics and low-carbon transportation.
• Circular economy, closed-loop supply chains, and reverse logistics.
• Carbon accounting, decarbonization, and net-zero supply chains.
• Digital innovation, artificial intelligence, and predictive analytics for sustainability.
• Blockchain, digital traceability, and supply chain transparency.
• Social sustainability, equity, and stakeholder management.
• Sustainable business models and interorganizational collaboration.
• Risk management, climate adaptation, and supply chain resilience.
• Sustainability performance measurement and decision-support tools.
• Governance, compliance, and supply chain due diligence.
• Strategic supply chain integration and system-wide transformation.
• Sustainable supply chains in emerging economies and global value chains.

Although research on green procurement, cleaner production, logistics, digitalization, circularity, social responsibility, and resilience has advanced considerably, these streams are frequently examined in isolation. This fragmentation limits understandings of cross-functional and cross-tier interactions, sustainability trade-offs, and when local initiatives produce system-wide benefits. This Special Issue brings these streams together through an integrated supply-network perspective, emphasizing measurable outcomes, implementation mechanisms, and context-specific evidence. It focuses on studies that quantify sustainability trade-offs; evaluate emerging technologies and decision-support tools in real-world settings; compare institutional and geographic contexts, including emerging economies; and use evidence to inform managerial practice and public policy. Collectively, the contributions are expected to advance coherent metrics, models, and implementation pathways for sustainable and resilient supply chains.

Prof. Dr. Minwir Al-Shammari
Prof. Dr. Jian Zhou
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-anonymized peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Sustainability is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• sustainable supply chain management
• supply chain innovation
• cross-tier integration
• circular economy
• digital transformation and artificial intelligence
• supply chain resilience
• system-wide sustainability assessment