Abstract
Seaports have increasingly been pressured by the shipping industry and port communities to increase their sustainability efforts and performance. Sustainability reporting has been proposed as a way to assess performance. Although several frameworks have been developed for sustainability reporting, few focus on performance (for example the Graphical Assessment of Sustainability Performance (GRASP)). For seaports, sustainability reporting has mainly focused on coverage of environmental issues, and on the port as an individual organisation. A critical review of assessment approaches was conducted, resulting in the identification of 424 port sustainability-related indicators; these were categorised, synthesised, and then compared with the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) guidelines. The findings show differences in the dimensions and number of indicators of the assessment approaches. GRI categories were modified and expanded for the environmental, economic, and social dimensions. Two new assessment categories, ‘port system’ and ‘interlinking issues’, were developed. This chapter proposes the Holistic Assessment of Sustainability Performance in Seaports (HASPS) framework, based on GRASP, and expanding the GRI by the addition of 75 port specific indicators, giving a total of 211 indicators. This will allow seaports to assess their sustainability performance over time, to better communicate their sustainability efforts, and to benchmark against other seaports.
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Fobbe, L., Lozano, R., Carpenter, A. (2020). Proposing a Holistic Framework to Assess Sustainability Performance in Seaports. In: Carpenter, A., Lozano, R. (eds) European Port Cities in Transition. Strategies for Sustainability. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36464-9_9
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