The Global Centre for Risk and Innovation (GCRI)
Logistics move goods from producers to users through containers, warehouses, trucks, rail and air freight; the cold chain does the same for food, vaccines and medicines that must stay within a temperature range. Both depend on energy, equipment and labour, and both fail quietly before shortages show. This page sets out how logistics and cold chains work and break, how capacity and integrity are measured, and what evidence serves the operators and agencies responsible.
Logistics and cold chain · Corridor A · Week 28
red: disrupted
by critical input
| Fertiliser | Strait | 7 | 6 | Short |
| Fuel | Strait | 4 | 6 | Tight |
| Semiconductors | Port hub | 15 | 8 | Short |
| Grain | Corridor A | 5 | 11 | Covered |
Fig.Corridor and chokepoint monitor. Design wireframe with placeholder names and illustrative values, not a record or a live system.
A cold chain is a temperature-controlled supply chain that keeps food, vaccines and medicines within a set range from production to use. With wider logistics, it runs on tight capacity, constant power and scarce labour, and its failures often appear only as shortages at the point of use.
For logistics and cold chain, in GCRI's spatial-intelligence reading, the map opens on night lights, population density and true-colour imagery with relief in 3D and true colour from NASA GIBS, framed on the Strait of Malacca; every other NASA layer, live feed and forecast waits in the layer list.
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NASA GIBS / EOSDIS · ASTER GDEM (METI, NASA) · Blue Marble (NASA) · © OpenStreetMap contributors (ODbL) · Natural Earth
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For logistics and cold chain, in GCRI's spatial-intelligence reading, the map opens on night lights, population density and true-colour imagery with relief in 3D and true colour from NASA GIBS, framed on the Strait of Malacca; every other NASA layer, live feed and forecast waits in the layer list.Satellite and model products as NASA publishes them, each with its own date; indicators, not assessments of any place; claim ceiling INTEGRATED.
Layers and dates
Transport time and disruption. The dossier below sets out how the risk develops, what is measured, where the data come from, how it is modelled and who decides.
Containers, vessels, trucks and warehouse space are run near full use to keep costs low. When demand jumps or capacity is lost, delays and costs rise sharply.
Refrigerated stores and transport depend on electricity and fuel. Outages and equipment failures expose products to temperatures that reduce quality or make them unsafe.
Drivers, port workers and warehouse staff are often in short supply. Illness, strikes and border rules can stop flows as surely as damaged infrastructure.
Spoiled food, lost vaccine doses and expired medicines are counted late, if at all. The first visible sign is often a shortage at the point of use.
Each term as this page uses it. Where a standard-setting body defines the term, the wording follows that body.
| Term | Definition |
|---|---|
| Temperature excursion | Exposure of a product to temperatures outside its permitted range. |
| Container dwell time | The time a container spends in a terminal before leaving. |
| Food loss | A decrease in food quantity or quality between harvest and retail. |
Each indicator carries its unit, its cadence, the kind of source behind it and the evidence label a value would carry. No values are shown: a programme supplies them under its own authority.
| Indicator | Unit | Cadence | Source type | Label |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Container dwell time at port | days | weekly | Port and terminal data | OBSERVED |
| Warehouse vacancy | percent of space | quarterly | Property market reports | REPORTED |
| Refrigerated storage capacity | cubic metres per thousand population | per assessment | Industry and government surveys | ESTIMATED |
| Temperature excursions in vaccine cold chain | count per period | monthly | Temperature monitoring devices | OBSERVED |
| Food loss in supply chain | percent of production lost before retail | per assessment | SDG indicator 12.3.1(a) Food Loss Index | ESTIMATED |
| Truck driver vacancies | count | annual | Labour market statistics | REPORTED |
The topic as a computational graph: named sources feed the methods, an evidence review gates the outputs, and the decisions stay with the authorities that hold them.
Fig. 02Nodes carry their type, two metric rows and a state; connectors show what feeds what; dashed frames name the owners; the timeline is the cadence. Design of the pipeline, not a record of a run.
Named public datasets and institutional records, each with its licence class. Sources by agreement are used only under their terms and never republished.
| Source | What it gives | Licence class |
|---|---|---|
| FAO Food Loss and Waste database | Food loss estimates by commodity and stage | Open, FAO terms |
| WHO and UNICEF Effective Vaccine Management assessments | Vaccine supply chain performance in countries | Public summaries, terms per agency |
| IMF PortWatch and UNCTADstat | Port activity and maritime statistics | Public, terms to check |
| International Institute of Refrigeration publications | Cold chain capacity and practice | Licence per publication |
| National transport and logistics statistics | Freight volumes, capacity and labour | Public records, licence per government |
Trade and Strategic Resources prepares evidence. The decisions below are taken by the authorities named, under their own rules, and never by the platform.
| Who decides | The question | Evidence this page serves |
|---|---|---|
| Ministries of health and immunisation programmes | Where cold chain capacity and monitoring must improve | Capacity maps; temperature excursion data |
| Ministries of agriculture and trade | Where storage and logistics investment reduces food loss | Food loss and capacity evidence |
| Logistics operators | Where to add buffer capacity and backup power | Bottleneck analyses; power dependency reviews |
Logistics networks are designed for efficiency, which often means high utilisation and little slack. When demand surges or capacity is lost, queues build quickly: ships wait at anchor, containers pile up and delivery times stretch. Recovery takes time because equipment and crews must be repositioned.
Perishable goods add a hard constraint. Fresh food, vaccines and many medicines must be kept within temperature ranges throughout the journey. A break in the cold chain, from a power outage, a delayed truck or a failed refrigeration unit, can spoil the product. Losses in the cold chain are a significant source of food waste in many regions.
Logistics is increasingly digital. Booking, customs, tracking and payment systems are interconnected, so a cyber incident or system outage at a major operator can halt physical flows.
Queueing, routing and inventory models using optimization and operations research. They rely on assumptions about behaviour under stress.
Assessment of terminal, road and rail capacity using transport engineering.
Sensor records from cold-chain shipments. Data are proprietary and not standardised.
Structured analysis of past events. Each event is different, which limits generalisation.
Real operating data are mostly held by private operators, so public analysis often relies on proxies and case studies.
The current service level is R0: information and enquiries. An enquiry receives a reference and names the next step; applications, payments, compute allocations and registrations open only when their team, terms and review capacity exist.