Sustainability practices for SDGs: a study of Brazilian ports

One of the main challenges facing ports is reducing social and environmental impacts and integrating sustainability into their core business practices. Ports must make explicit moves toward publishing their policies and contributions to the low carbon economy in their reports. In 2015, the United Nations adopted a global action plan for sustainable development known as Agenda 2030. It contains 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and calls for global cooperation between governments, businesses, and civilian organizations to achieve these shared sustainable goals. This article seeks to identify sustainability practices for SDGs using content analysis on reports published by Brazilian Public Port Authorities between 2017 and 2020. Our study sampled ten port authorities that manage seventeen ports, which handled 76% of all national cargo shipments in 2021. This study is exploratory and descriptive research that involves qualitative analysis aided by Iramuteq analysis software. We concluded that the port authority reports mostly cited SDG 8 (Providing Decent Work and Economic Growth), SDG 11 (Creating Sustainable Cities and Communities), and SDG 14 (Protecting Aquatic/Marine Life) for the analyzed period. In practice, SDGs became a part of the port authority discussion agenda as of 2018. Only four of the ten port authorities, we evaluated reported on the SDG topic in 2020. As per the reports, SDG actions at most Brazilian ports are still incipient.