Severe acute malnutrition affects millions of children globally. Ready-to-Use Therapeutic Food (RUTF) is a life-saving treatment, but distributing it at scale across complex international supply chains is costly and generates substantial transportation-related carbon emissions. This capstone examines how transportation carbon emissions and costs compare when sourcing RUTF from South Asia versus other regions and identifies the trade-offs associated with each strategy. We mapped the current South Asia RUTF sourcing network, estimated shipment-level transportation carbon emissions using an expression from the Network for Transport Measures (NTM) methodology, and developed a multi-objective optimization model to evaluate baseline and alternative sourcing scenarios. Results show that optimizing the current network reduces emissions by up to 57.3% and costs by 34.6%. We recommend aligning sourcing and routing decisions with the optimization model outputs, prioritizing local South Asian suppliers to improve both sustainability and cost performance. More broadly, the NTM methodology paired with optimization modeling offers organizations a practical framework to evaluate shipment-level trade-offs in global supply chains. This demonstrates that intentional supplier and routing decisions can simultaneously cut costs and emissions, with regional sourcing often yielding gains in both metrics without compromise.
