ASSESSMENT OF PORT SUSTAINABILITY INDICATORS IN THE SUSTAINABILITY REPORTING PROCESS

Abstract

Sustainability reporting has become an institutionalized tool for transferring the performance of a company in environmental, financial and social performance, unfortunately, lack of common port sustainability indicators (PSI) used by all ports in port sustainability reports, is the main motivation of this study. Therefore, the main aim of this study is to decide prevalently used port sustainability indicators in the sustainability reporting process by measuring their usage frequency and to suggest PSIs set to the ports for future sustainability reports. To reach that aim of the study, first port sustainability indicators that focused on port sustainability measurement in current literature will be gathered together to obtain sub-dimensions of sustainability, then 7 different ports sustainability reports which published in 2014 will be analyzed via the NVivo 8 software programme. At the end, the most used and unused port sustainability indicators (PSIs) in the sustainability reporting process will be identified under the three main dimensions of sustainability. One of the important results of the study is; 34 of the 60 PSI's that identified are not included in any port sustainability report. In the last part of the study, research limitations and suggestions for future studies are included.