Humanitarian Logistics: Empirical Investigations of Influences on Logistical Activities of Humanitarian Organizations

To write the motivation of a thesis in the context of humanitarian relief while keeping up to date is like a Sisyphean task. Again, and again new disasters occur on our earth, which gives this topic its particular relevance. This becomes clear just by examining the most devastating natural disasters of the last five years (roughly the period of time in which this dissertation was written): 2015 earthquake in Nepal (8.831 deaths, 5.6 million people affected), Hurricane Matthew in 2016 (595 deaths, 2.4 million affected), 2017 Landslide in Sierra Leone (1.102 deaths, 12.000 affected), 2018 earthquake in Indonesia (4.340 deaths, 209.000 affected), and 2019 Measles in the Democratic Republic of Congo (5.400 deaths, 250.000 affected) (CRED and UCLouvain, 2020). In addition, disasters that occurred even longer ago cast their long shadows on the work of humanitarian actors. The earthquake in Haiti in 2010 with more than 220,000 deaths is exemplary here (CRED and UCLouvain, 2020). Even today, there are still over a hundred different organizations with humanitarian and development activities onsite