Harmonizing Green Trade and Sustainable Logistics: A Semantic Analysis of Policy Documents and Industry Reports

Abstract

This study investigates the semantic alignment between policy frameworks and industry communications in the domains of green trade and sustainable logistics. By constructing a dual corpus of 40 policy documents and 30 industry reports published between 2022 and mid-2025, the research applies text preprocessing, term frequency–inverse document frequency (TF–IDF), Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic modelling, and semantic network analysis to identify convergent and divergent terminology. Results reveal strong convergence on emissions-related and circular economy terms, indicating shared sustainability priorities. However, regulatory texts favor compliance-oriented language while industry reports emphasize technological innovation and customer-centric operations, leading to siloed thematic clusters with limited interconnectivity. Underutilized cross-cutting concepts such as supply chain resilience and multi-stakeholder partnerships were identified as potential bridges between policy and practice. Based on these findings, the paper recommends establishing a unified sustainability glossary, integrating operational terminology into regulatory documents, and developing a dynamic ontology to map relationships among core concepts. Collaborative multistakeholder workshops and pilot interoperability projects are proposed to maintain adaptive semantic frameworks. These measures aim to enhance clarity, reduce compliance burdens, and foster coherent global strategies for green trade and sustainable logistics. The study underscores the importance of harmonized language in accelerating the effective implementation of environmental objectives across international trade and logistics sectors.