Sustainability at Spanish ports specialized in liquid bulk: evolution in times of crisis (2010–2015)

ABSTRACT

In Spain, 28 Port Authorities of general interest moved more than 168 thousand tonnes of liquid bulk (34% of overall traffic) in 2015. Almost 82% of this amount corresponded to eight ports (G-8) that have a refinery within their facilities. This unique degree of specialization and concentration makes this set of ports an ideal sample to analyse the evolution of their sustainability levels, particularly during the crisis started in 2008 and onwards. A proprietary methodology based on Multidimensional Synthetic Indices has been used. The comparison of the findings obtained for 2010 and 2015 allows a diagnosis of the evolution of port sustainability measured through the economic, institutional, environmental and social dimensions to be established, as well as a study of the patterns of behaviour that each port has followed in this issue.

KEYWORDS:

• Crisis
• sustainable development
• synthetic indicators
• ports
• Spain

Acknowledgments

The authors thank to the four anonymous referees for their extraordinary and constructive comments on earlier versions of this article. The authors are very grateful for the outstanding guidance received from the editor. The authors wish to express their gratitude to Puertos del Estado for placing at their disposal the data and information required to undertake this research.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. At the ports of A Coruña, Bilbao, Cartagena and Tarragona the oil refinery is managed by Repsol. At the ports of Bay of Algeciras, Huelva and Santa Cruz de Tenerife the management company is CEPSA. Lastly, British Petroleum manages the refinery at the port of Castellón.

2. The considered variables are similar to those verified and tested in previous research of the authors (González Laxe et al. 2016, 2017), referenced in this paper, with the particularity that, in this case, they apply to ports that specialize in liquid bulk.

3. This PA either offers incomplete data or does not provide information on its Sustainability Reports.

4. In order not to be repetitive, details of the procedure can be found in González Laxe et al. (2017), more specifically section 3, Calculation Methodology.

5. This type of test is used because it is a distribution with a small number of variables.