Since the 19th century, greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions have been increasing every year and have led to detrimental effects on the environment. GHG emissions stem from greenhouse gases which trap heat and warm the Earth’s surface, a factor leading to the current climate crisis. Therefore, the scale of climate emergency concerns all stakeholders in a society. Specifically, businesses have responsibilities and a strong influence in slowing the trajectory of climate crisis by mitigating GHG emissions associated with their operations.
In this thesis, possibilities to reduce GHG emissions within an inbound logistics flow are investigated by analyzing a food company as a case study. A combination of a bottom-up literature review, qualitative interviews and quantitate GHG emissions calculations are used to uncover a baseline assessment of inbound logistics flow to evaluate and inform of potential GHG emissions alleviation strategies. This research shows that an understanding of an inbound logistics network and a baseline assessment of associated GHG emissions can be facilitative for businesses, especially food companies heavily reliant on inbound logistics to trace and mitigate their GHG emissions.

Public procurement in the European Union is an important part of interaction between governments and the market. According to the European Commission1 every year over 250 000 public authorities in the EU spend around 14% of GDP (around €2 trillion per year) on the purchase of services, works and supplies. Often perceived as a purely bureaucratic process, it is in fact one of the key procedures to shape the quality of the public spending. Public spending in question addresses wide range of the problems including metropolitan challenges of the modern world. As the local and national governments approach key issues such as climate change, public health, or transition towards zero-emission economy, they need to do it accordingly with the public procurement regulations. There are always exceptions possible but overall and on bigger scale it is not possible to avoid them. Having said that, public procurement with all its own challenges is one of the key elements of public policy creation and implementation. From the author's own working experience, challenges of public procurement include a wide range of issues from personal relations, procedural and financial requirements to sourcing knowledge and information necessary for describing the procured services, works or supplies. This experience showed also that certain people working in the field of procurement are more successful than others although they must follow the same set of rules as the rest of the organisation. This observation sparked interest which resulted in this thesis.