Making A Difference Humanitarian Logistics

Drones can provide essential information during a crisis, but launching them is only one move in a complex array of humanitarian concerns.

- Anne-Frances Hutchinson

2017 was the single-most costly year for natural disasters in the United States, with an economic price tag of over $390 billion. In those 12 months, 16 events outpaced the cost of damage wrought in 2005 by Hurricanes Katrina, Rita, Wilma, and Dennis combined by over a billion dollars.

The U.S. humanitarian logistics market is on the verge of an unprecedented boom: by 2022, the market is expected to reach $24 billion. As a developed economy with a sound disaster recovery infrastructure that includes an abundance of airports able to handle air cargo shipments, the U.S. is poised to lead the global market for these services.

Researchers at Technavio point to the increasing need for professional logistics services as a key driver in the market’s expansion. They note that a perfect storm of an increased number of natural disasters, an increasingly volatile economy, and constrained funding and resources will continue to push the outsourcing trend forward.

“Logistics companies provide information and communication technology platforms, which help in rescue operations,” said a Technavio senior analyst. “Additionally, NGOs, aid agencies, and governments neither have the required qualified personnel nor have the infrastructure or necessary resources such as trucks to address problems in the supply chain such as the transportation and distribution of relief supplies that need to be carried out after a disaster.”

In addition to the outsourcing push, Technavio’s findings point to the increased use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) as a major emergent trend in humanitarian logistics that is reshaping the way disaster recovery aid is dispensed. UAVs enable aid workers to remotely move cargo, survey damage, find those in peril, and create high-quality imaging data such as high resolution risk maps.

FLYING WHERE HUMANS DARE TO TREAD