Resilience in Humanitarian Supply Chains: A Systematic Review of Disruption, Recovery, and Emerging AI Applications

Background: Humanitarian supply chains (HSCs) face growing disruption from disasters, geopolitical instability, and climate-related events, increasing the need for resilient operations. Despite growing scholarly attention, the HSC resilience literature remains fragmented across existing reviews. Methods: This study conducts a systematic literature review covering publications from 2014 to May 2026. The search results were combined and deduplicated, leaving 1202 unique records for screening, of which 63 peer-reviewed articles met the inclusion criteria. The selected studies were analyzed using a six-theme framework supported by pairwise Jaccard similarity analysis. Results: The review reveals limited empirical validation: only 5 of the 63 studies (7.9%) use direct real-world disaster data, while 9 (14.3%) draw on empirical organizational or field data. The AI/ML theme comprises 10 studies; only 3 engage with equity-related considerations, and none incorporate equity as an explicit objective or constraint. No study explicitly focuses on slow-onset climate-induced disasters, while large language models remain largely unexplored in HSC resilience research. Conclusions: The study identifies major theoretical and practical gaps and proposes future research directions centered on equity-by-design and context-specific resilience strategies for humanitarian operations.