Port Sustainability Research Articles

Enhancing the Competitiveness of Container Seaports Through Sustainability: A Case Study of Thailand

Sustainability has become a key goal of any supply chain which aims to be more competitive in the long term. And ports are a vital part of maritime transportation and maritime supply chains. Therefore, they need to comply with a global sustainability agenda while developing their competitiveness and performance as well. Their improvement should take economic, environmental and social aspects of sustainability into account simultaneously. Enabling of sustainability in ports is now widely recognised as increasing competitiveness. The sustainability of container seaports has become an increasing focus of attention in developed countries in particular, although emerging economies are the key driver of growth for the global economy. Hence, this paper aims to propose a set of criteria to investigate the port sustainability performance of container ports in an emerging country: Thailand. Thailand port system is one of the busiest of ASEAN. To address this issue, the new MCDM method called Best-Worst is proposed to evaluate the importance of factors. This propose to guide for assessment framework of port sustainability development within the Thailand context in the future.

Análisis de las dimensiones institucional, económica, social y ambiental portuarias a través de inteligencia artificial

Los puertos son impulsores, pero a la vez están inmersos en los procesos de globalización de las sociedades. Es por ello que no son ajenos a la potencialidad de las metodologías de minería de datos, las cuales intentan descubrir patrones en grandes volúmenes de conjuntos de datos como los que se manejan en el ámbito portuario: La minería de datos es una disciplina ligada a la inteligencia artificial que, aplicado en un entorno portuario, posibilita encontrar nuevas herramientas para aumentar la sostenibilidad portuaria. Este artículo pretende analizar la sostenibilidad portuaria a través de las relaciones que se establecen entre variables de sostenibilidad, empleando para ello técnicas de inteligencia artificial como son las redes bayesianas. La principal conclusión que se extrae del análisis es que el pilar fundamental de la sostenibilidad portuaria es la dimensión institucional.

Framing Stakeholder Involvement in Sustainable Port Planning

This paper presents a framework to encompass stakeholder involvement in port planning processes, by specifically focusing on long-term strategic plans aimed at sustainability and designed to satisfy the needs of a port community and its surroundings. A classification of the main port stakeholders is presented, together with some traditional and non-conventional tools and methods that can be used to support the participation process, according to the degree of participation and the steps of the plan. This analysis takes its clue from the results of the EU PORTA project, aimed at setting a new system of guidelines to integrate regional planning and port management. Port authorities and local policy-makers can use the output of this analysis to understand how to deal with the complexity of multi actor decisions in port planning. By duly taking into consideration stakeholders’ needs and concerns it will be easier to find the most shared solutions pursuing port sustainability.

Sustainability efficiency evaluation of seaports in China: an uncertain data envelopment analysis approach

Sustainability is regarded as achieving economic, environmental, and social dimensions simultaneously that support an organization for long-term competitiveness. Port sustainability has attracted increasing attention because it is related to the issues of climate change and public health and safety. Therefore, it is urgent to measure the sustainability of ports. However, some variables (for instance, air pollutants and the neighboring relationship with surrounding communities) cannot be measured precisely by collecting quantitative data. This led us to select 23 seaports of China and use uncertain variables and uncertain data envelopment analysis model to measure their sustainability efficiency. Moreover, we captured the quantity to be improved of each output. The results show that 14 seaports such as Shanghai Port and Qingdao Port are deemed to be inefficient in terms of their sustainability. And our results can identify whether economic, environmental, or social dimensions contribute to the sustainability inefficiency of each seaport. On the basis of the results, we point out the managerial implications and put forward measures toward enhancing the efficiency of seaports with respect to these two dimensions.

Exploring the conditions for inclusive port development: the case of Indonesia

ABSTRACTGovernments around the world are adopting inclusive growth agendas. The ambition to align economic growth ambitions with broader-based social benefits is increasingly embraced by corporations to limit the ‘negative externalities’ and enhance the ‘positive externalities’ of their operations. Therefore, micro-level corporate strategies and macro-level national ambitions meet at the meso-level of networks and clusters. This requires societal spheres to collaborate and search for alternative governance constellations. In this discourse, port development is only recently receiving attention. In March 2018, ports around the world signed the World Ports Sustainability Program declaration, which aims to contribute to the sustainable development goals (SDGs), whilst a number of national port (master) plans have started to include social along with environmental standards. Extant studies on partnering and stakeholder inclusion in port development are proliferating but are primarily aimed at environmental rather than social (inclusion) issues. This paper adopts an exploratory research design to consider conditions for inclusive port development. A novel taxonomy considers port development as a driver for inclusive growth, where partnerships are the missing link between micro-level business strategies and macro-level effects in the port region and economy at large. This paper shows the first findings and delineates areas for further research.

The evaluation of seaport sustainability: The case of South Korea

The concept of port sustainability has gained increasing attention and become one of the most important focus areas for improving port competitiveness. This research aims to identify crucial criteria for assessing sustainability of the ports in South Korea using the importance-performance analysis (IPA) technique. A total of 27 sustainability assessment items encompassing all three pillars of sustainability-environmental, economic, and social aspects-were established from previous research and interviews. A survey was conducted with the port managers to evaluate the importance of the identified assessment measures and their perceived performances. The findings indicate that the economic issue associated with offering employment opportunities was deemed the most important measure, followed by environmental concerns and social factors. They also provide useful managerial insights for the ports to understand port sustainability issues so as to discover areas for improvements and direct their resources to the appropriate areas to enhance port competitiveness.

Hacia la sostenibilidad portuaria mediante modelos probabilísticos: redes bayesianas

En la explotación y gestión es necesario que el gestor de la infraestructura conozca las relaciones entre las variables en juego, lo cual es factible con el uso de redes bayesianas que permiten clasificar, predecir y diagnosticar las variables, pudiendo incluso estimar la probabilidad posterior de las no conocidas en base a las conocidas. En la metodología propuesta se ha generado una base de datos con variables portuarias, clasificadas en económicas, sociales, ambientales e institucionales, tal como se abordan los estudios de smart ports, en el Sistema Portuario Español, desarrollando una red mediante un grafo dirigido acíclico para conocer las relaciones en términos de padres e hijos. En términos probabilísticos, se observa que las variables más decisoras para la sostenibilidad portuaria son las institucionales. Se concluye que las redes bayesianas permiten modelar la incertidumbre de forma probabilística incluso cuando el número de variables es elevado como en la planificación y explotación portuaria.

Sustainability issues in ports: content analysis and review of the literature (1987- 2017)

Sustainability, which has environmental, social and economic dimensions, is a phenomenon that has been used extensively in recent times. As decided in Brundtland Conference in 1987, it basically aims to meet the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. When it is taken into consideration in terms of sustainability, it is known that ports are one of the most polluting sectors due to their nature. However, in recent years many ports have started to different sustainability programs and invested in large amounts over the years to reduce emissions and to gain a competitive advantage. When examined the past studies, it is determined that the sustainability concept is a relatively recent approach in the maritime literature and still a gap exist in this field. It is thought that the analysis of these studies in a systematic way will contribute to the port sustainability literature. Therefore, in this study, it is aimed to review port sustainability concept with the help of existing literature. For the methodology, studies obtained from different databases were evaluated systematically by using content analysis. The study has been concluded with the findings for the related literature, recommendations for the sector and guidelines for future researches.

Conceptual Model Development of Sustainability Practices: The Case of Port Operations for Collaboration and Governance

Sustainability practices in port operations are critical issue to achieve port sustainability involving economic, social and environmental issues. To assist ports to successfully implant sustainability practices into their operations, this paper conceptualized the structure of sustainability practices in international port operations, by clustering the relevant issues, empirically. Using 203 samples collected from port stakeholders in the major ports in Northeast Asia, multi-measurement items were analyzed on exploratory factor analysis in SPSS 21. Results generated a structure that consists of five sub-dimensions conceptualizing sustainability practices in the context of port operations. As operative practices to accommodate current and future demands in a port, the five-factor model clustering the relevant issues incorporate environmental technologies, process and quality improvement, monitoring and upgrading, communication and cooperation, and active participation. Providing useful insights for strategic agenda to assist ports to incorporate sustainability practices in their operations, the five-factor model offer both a descriptive and diagnostic management tool for future improvement in port operations.

Strategic monitoring of port authorities activities: Proposal of a multi-dimensional digital dashboard

The consequence of port evolution is that port authorities (PA) around the world are modifying their nature and their role, acquiring more and more an active role in the governance of logistic systems and are often adopting managerial and entrepreneurial behaviours. This new role of PA requires the adoption of a complex approach to monitoring the performance of the single stakeholders and of the whole port. Existing studies on port performance consider only specific indicators of port performance such as operational and financial efficiency neglecting aspects like customer satisfaction, port security and port sustainability. This paper tries to fill this literature gap: (i) outlining an integrated multi-dimensional dashboard to monitor port performance in a strategic perspective; (ii) analysing the role of digital technology to support the PA in the implementation of the monitoring dashboard; (iii) defining the evolutionary stages of tools implementation in the strategic monitoring of PAs.

Assessment of port sustainability through synthetic indexes. Application to the Spanish case

In general, Synthetic Indexes of sustainability have been applied to specific countries and regions. With some variations, the ones considered simple, such as the case of the Ecological Footprint (EF), have been applied to port areas. The same has not happened with those of a multidimensional nature (Global Synthetics) that still have a minimal and partial presence in the analysis of port sustainability.Understanding that this type of index represents an interesting and novel avenue of research applied to port systems, this contribution analyses and ranks a sample of 16 Spanish Port Authorities that group 23 ports of general interest using a Global Synthetic Index of Sustainability (developed using the four dimensions of sustainable development: economic, institutional, environmental and social).

Managing European Cross Border Cooperation Projects on Sustainability: A Focus on MESP Project

International cooperation is a must to achieve the goal of sustainable development, since only through cross border actions’ complex issues like environmental degradation can be faced. Supranational initiatives and shared objectives are the only path for getting a durable and effective green strategy, which transcends boundaries or governments and fosters a common effort for sustainability through networking. The European Neighborhood and Partnership Instrument (ENPI) aims at reinforcing cooperation between the European Union (EU) and partner countries’ regions placed along the shores of the Mediterranean Sea. To this extent, MESP (Managing the Environmental Sustainability of Ports for a durable development) can be considered as a typical cross border cooperation project, willing to create a sustainable environmental management of port in northern and southern shores of the Mediterranean basin. This has been achieved through the development of specific guidelines towards environmental sustainability and the collection of common tools, methodologies, good practices and innovations focused on pollution reduction that can be replicated in Mediterranean ports and further. This was possible through the creation of a strong cooperation network and long-lasting collaborations among partners and stakeholders such as harbour cities, port authorities, universities, research centres and scientific skills.

Sustainability and the Spanish port system. Analysis of the relationship between economic and environmental indicators

Research into the methodological development of alternative systems of sustainability measures is recent. In understanding sustainable development in a multi-dimensional sense, one of the most significant advances was the construction of Synthetic Indexes, applicable to different spatial spheres or to organisations, businesses, institutions, etc.The Spanish port system of general interest comprises 46 ports integrated in 28 Port Authorities, which in 2014 moved 482,000,000t of goods and more than 28 million passengers. This gives an idea of its importance for the Spanish economy.Using a derivation of the procedure used to calculate the Port Sustainability Synthetic Index, in this research the analysis of the relationship that exists between the findings obtained for the economic and environmental dimensions is used. This enables the existence of links between ports and economic and environmental indicators for a sample of 16 Port Authorities of Spain to be verified.

Identifying crucial sustainability assessment criteria for container seaports

Purpose The purpose of this study is to identify crucial sustainability assessment criteria in the context of international port sector. Design/methodology/approach Data collection was based on a questionnaire survey from 135 managers and supervisors at major international ports in Taiwan, including Keelung, Taichung and Kaohsiung. A confirmatory factor analysis was conducted to identify crucial sustainability assessment criteria at ports. Findings A total of 31 important sustainable assessment criteria were adapted from previous studies in terms of environmental, economic and social issues. Results revealed that social issues with respect to staff job security and safety were ranked as the most important sustainability assessment criteria, followed by environmental protection when handling cargo, facilitation of economic activities, port traffic accidents prevention and cargo handled safely and effectively. In contrary, respondents revealed their less importance in the criteria, namely, mitigating light influence on neighboring residents, considering the arrangement of vehicles when constructing port transportation system, avoiding using unpolluted land in port area and hiring minority groups and consulting interests groups when making port projects. Four sustainability assessment dimensions were identified, namely, environmental material, economic issue, environmental practices and social concerns. Research limitations/implications The research findings indicated that economic issue was deemed as the most important dimension of sustainability assessment criteria from a port operator’s perspective, followed by environmental practices, social concerns and environmental material. Practical implications for port sustainability assessment were discussed in this research. Originality/value Although a majority of previous studies on sustainability assessment have been discussed, there is still a lack of investigation of sustainability assessment in the context of port sector. This study not only develops sustainability assessment attributes but also highlights the important criteria of sustainability assessment. Further, this study identified four crucial sustainability assessment factors, which provide helpful information for port corporations to identify important criteria and policy of sustainability assessment.

A literature review on port sustainability and ocean's carrier network problem

In the present paper, we aim to review the maritime literature of two interrelated concepts: Port Sustainability and Ocean's Carrier Network Problem (OCNP). The past literature did not establish a clear relationship between these two concepts, as the sustainability concept is a relatively recent approach in the maritime literature, and still a gap exists in this field. This study will have the objective to review the port sustainability concept and then to relate it to the OCNP, in order to reach a conceptual framework which will integrate port sustainability indicators in the OCNP. This will be achieved by interrelating them using the triple bottom line concept and focusing solely on the environmental approach. The conceptual framework will be our future perspective to be achieved through our upcoming work.

US container port resilience in a complex and dynamic world

The resilience of US container ports is increasingly challenged by disruptive and stressful events such as regulatory change, adverse weather, larger container ship sizes, changing patterns of trade and sea routes, and the still to be quantified effects of enlarging the capabilities and capacity of the Panama Canal. Port sustainability requires the port managers to be resilient in their practices, to maintain existing performance levels and to increase market share when opportunity presents. The primary question that this paper addresses is how US container ports might be affected by adverse events and how they undertake resilience processes when faced with complex problems and uncertain outcomes. The paper gathers insights from literature on complex adaptive systems to discuss how US container ports may adapt to changing circumstances through innovation and the emergent outputs of self-organised agents (components) of their port organisations. The paper suggests that by conceptualising ports as complex adaptive systems, port managers may be able to better understand the complexity of change and organisational dynamics and thus harness the phenomenon of self-organisation towards their strategic intent.

Exploring the viability of an emission tax policy for ships at berth in Taiwanese ports

This paper considers an emissions tax to help limit external air pollution from ships in Taiwanese ports through a mixed methods research (MMR) approach. Through an empirical bottom-up activity-based model, external air pollution costs are estimated for seven types of ships at berth during 2012 in the three largest Taiwanese container ports. Results show pollutants are both measurable and serious in scale, i.e. that such a tax is theoretically valuable and viable. To investigate introducing such a tax at a practical policy level, qualitative in-depth interviews were conducted with fifteen experts: port operators and government officials. Their perceptions reveal many significant tensions regarding the practicality of an emissions tax, such as a need to introduce it globally, and the idea that it may be unnecessary given other initiatives can create port sustainability. Based on these results, possibilities and considerations for the implementation and study of sustainable port operation are made.

Towards a sustainability management system for smaller ports

Larger ports routinely deploy environmental management tools but systematic sustainability management in smaller ports is rare. Accordingly, this paper assesses the sustainability needs of smaller ports in Cornwall and Devon, a case-study, and proposes a systematic method for identifying and managing them. The development and deployment of a Port Sustainability Management System for smaller ports in an environmentally sensitive but economically peripheral UK area is discussed. In-depth collaboration with Harbour Masters to identify sustainability management practice revealed few applications of the theoretical elements of triple bottom line accounting. Rather, semi-structured interviews unearthed the essential elements of port management and facilitated mapping of the forces which underpin port sustainability practices. A constructivist grounded theory approach identified emerging concepts, common patterns and sustainability themes, which were synthesised into a Sustainability Management System based on 11 indicators of knowledge criteria and a self-scoring mechanism. Adopters reported a more proactive stance towards sustainability and safeguarding of local communities, improved understanding, and more effective discourse with stakeholders. Benefits spanned port improvements; awareness of progress, performance, strengths and weaknesses; enhanced communication and reporting; and improved thought processes. Almost all reacted positively and identified multiple benefits, equating to two new jobs in each port.

Nordic Container Port Sustainability Performance—A Conceptual Intelligent Framework

There is a lack of both integrative frameworks for container ports and dedicated ones to the Nordic region as observed in the literature. The purpose of this paper is to fill that gap by proposing a conceptual intelligent sustainability performance management framework for Nordic container ports. First a description of such framework is given where the application of artificial intelligence is vital. Then, scanning the literature for performance measurement, features of ports in the Nordic region and port sustainability is undertaken. A dedicated list of key performance indicators is suggested. Finally, a prototype based on hypothetical data is developed for demonstration purposes.

Selection and characterization of indigenous hydrocarbon-degrading bacteria from tourist ports in the Mediterranean Sea Basin

Pollution by petroleum hydrocarbons is one of the major environmental problems in ports and it is mainly associated with ship/boat traffic and related facilities. Ports are not closed systems and their pollution may impact adjacent coastal areas. Hydrocarbon degraders and particularly the obligate hydrocarbonoclastic bacteria carry out a fundamental and global activity in biological removal of hydrocarbons in marine habitats. This studywas carried out withinMAPMED, amultidisciplinary project aimed to improve the environmental sustainability of tourist ports in the Mediterranean Sea with regard to monitoring and reduction of hydrocarbon pollution. Three tourist ports were selected as case study sites: Cagliari (Italy), El Kantaoui (Tunisia), and Heraklion (Greece). The degradation potential of the autochthonous bacterial communities was evaluated enumerating heterotrophs and hydrocarbon degraders by MPN in the surface seawater. Heterotrophs were significantly more abundant in seawater from Cagliari port as compared to El Kantaoui and Heraklion ports. On the contrary, higher viable titles of dieseland phenanthrene-degraders were found in seawater from El Kantaoui port compared to the other two areas. Hydrocarbon-degrading bacteria were isolated and characterized regarding their phylogenetic position and catabolic abilities. The hydrocarbon degradation activities were evaluated by GC-MS in aerobic batch reactors on diesel as carbon source. The majority of degraders from Cagliari were assigned to Pseudomonas whereas strains from El Kantaoui and Heraklion were assigned to Alcanivorax and Marinobacter. The selection of the most appropriate methodologies for the eco-efficient remediation of petroleum-hydrocarbon contamination of selected sites is currently in progress.