Abstract
The surge in electronic commerce calls for the potential for green innovations in last mile delivery. Existing studies on the topic are fragmented, and have explored diverse green innovations across different regions, reporting conflicting findings. Thus, this review aims to fill this gap by conducting a comprehensive study to identify underlying themes and propose future research agendas on the topic. A word analysis was performed on 628 publications extracted from the Scopus database for the period between 2000 and 2024. Findings reveal an increasing trend in publications, covering five themes: sustainability, optimisation and vehicle routing, consumer behaviour, technological innovations, urban mobility and freight transportation. Sustainability is the most dominant theme. In addition, the underexplored areas include social aspects of sustainability, intangible technological innovations, and consumer behaviour on emerging delivery technologies. Future studies should target under-researched areas, such as regulatory interventions required to increase the uptake of green innovations, real-world application of intangible technologies (e.g. artificial intelligence), demand and willingness to pay for emerging delivery technologies (e.g. electric vehicles), integrating smart city innovations and renewable energy sources into last mile delivery. However, this review is limited to publications extracted from the Scopus database.