Evaluating sustainability factors of green ports in China under fuzzy environment

The seaports in China are the busiest in the world and facing challenges pertaining to environmental pollution, Green House Gases (GHG) emissions, damages to the marine ecosystem etc. To tackle these issues, the maritime community in China is looking for sustainable green solutions. One way forward is to establish green ports, but there is no reliable intelligence available on sustainability of such an idea. For that reason, this research aims to discern relevant sustainability factors for green ports development. Thereafter, the identified factors are assessed using FAHP (Fuzzy Analytic Hierarchy Process) method of MCDM (Multi-Criteria Decision-Making). The results indicate that the factors; Environment, Digitization, Automation, and Strategy are ranked top three censorious among six identified main categories of the factors. Further, sensitivity analysis is carried out to check the robustness of the applied method. The industry managers and policy makers must attentively monitor and adopt top ranked factors to establish sustainable green practices at Chinese ports.