Road Freight Transport Literature and the Achievements of the Sustainable Development Goals—A Systematic Review

Abstract

Considering the importance of the road freight transport sector on the sustainability debate, the purpose of this paper is to present a comprehensive review of the road freight transport literature to provide key information on the role that this field of knowledge must play in contributing to the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). To accomplish this, we performed a state-of-the-art review via systematic literature on 86 documents published during 2015–2020, with an emphasis on environmental, economic, and technical studies. Ultimately, this paper seeks to uncover research gaps and to suggest means in which the freight transport literature and the 17 SDGs may be faced by this field in future studies. the results showed that the SDGs were not target by the analyzed papers, and the sustainable development goals were not quoted at all. The only SDG fully contemplated was number 7—affordable and clean energy. The findings of this study suggest that this field should add research of SDGs 2, 3, 7, 9, 11, 12, 13, and 17 as priority areas to be further developed by the RFT literature to achieve SDGs goals.