Assessment of environmental sustainability issues for South-Asian maritime ports

ABSTRACT It is evident from the volumes of recently published research articles that ‘maritime sustainability’ is getting much attention nowadays. However, there has been a bias when it comes to the selection of maritime ports. The majority of studies have been done for European and North American ports, but very few have been done for Asian ports, especially when it comes to South-Asian ports. This research evaluated South Asia’s eleven major maritime ports to identify significant environmental sustainability issues they are currently facing through extensive literature review and then sorting these issues based on the Importance-Performance Analysis (IPA) technique. Later, these eleven Major South-Asian ports were ranked based on these sorted issues using the Segmented String Relative Ranking algorithm, thereby analysing environmental sustainable practises at the selected South-Asian ports on a long term basis. The top three ranked Ports are Port of Malé (Maldives), Jawaharlal Nehru Port, Mumbai (India) and Port of Colombo (Srilanka).