Ports are the most important nodes in the supply chain of cargo and improving their sustainability will positively affect the sector as a whole. This improvement can be achieved by incorporating stakeholders in the process of port development. Social, environmental and economic development achieved together are defined as sustainable development.
In the prospect of sustainable port development, Ethiopia is an interesting country to study because of its rapid and relatively stable economic growth since 2005 and its low logistics performance. This study is built around a dry port expansion project in Ethiopia, for which a 150 million USD loan from the World Bank recently became available. Modjo Dry Port (MDP) is located close to the capital of Ethiopia and its largest production and consumption areas. Before acting directly, the sustainability of the alternatives according to different stakeholders, should be considered. Incorporating sustainable development in the project in general is a significant challenge. This leads to the formulation of a research question. How to evaluate strategic alternatives for sustainable expansion of Modjo Dry Port? This study describes a method on how to develop a number of distinct alternatives, and proposes a framework for the evaluation of sustainable dry port expansion. Such an evaluation tool for the dry port site specifically, does not yet exist. The framework is tested for MDP in Ethiopia.
For the development of the alternatives of MDP, two overarching themes at the dry port were identified: operations are inefficient with dwell time of 50 to 60 days on average, and no diversification of cargo. Based on these themes three alternatives for MDP are defined. For the sustainable evaluation of Modjo Dry Port the Multi-Criteria-Multi-Actor analysis (MAMCA) is used because it explicitly incorporates stakeholder incentives in a more traditional multi-decision criteria analysis (MCDA). The MAMCA consists of seven steps.
Step 1 and 2: Four stakeholder groups for MDP are defined: internal, community, public policy makers and private companies. For the 3rd and 4th step, a framework for evaluation is constructed, based on literature and stakeholders’ input. The criteria are categorised based on the three pillars of sustainability: social, environmental and economic development. In step 5 the weights for the criteria of the evaluation framework are determined by stakeholders. In the last steps of the MAMCA the proposed alternatives were scored against the current layout of MDP for all criteria in the evaluation framework. The final output is a multi-actor view on scoring the alternatives.
Dry ports closer to Addis Ababa are a suitable alternative for MDP. Stakeholder participation is an important part of the study, however, it proved difficult to integrate a sufficient number of stakeholder responses in the analysis.
For MDP specifically, stakeholder groups showed similar interest, and the preference for different alternatives is equal amongst the groups. Analysis shows that the alternatives improving operation efficiency score markedly higher on sustainability. ... Read more

Bahía Blanca in Buenos Aires province is located 600 kilometres south of Buenos Aires city. The port complex of Bahía Blanca has the second largest throughput in Argentina considering tons, mainly attributed to the agro – and petrochemical industry. The port handles containers as well, however with an average of 30 thousand TEU/year this throughput is rather small. The authority of the Port of Bahía Blanca sees opportunities to increase container throughput in the port due to recent developments in the region. The container throughput is estimated for 2040, considering the petrochemical cluster and fruits. Four different trends show a container throughput of respectively 30, 155, 250 and 360 thousand TEU/year. The capacity of the container terminal is estimated at 50 thousand TEU/year, based on the equipment, the dwell time and the terminal area. The terminal should improve when throughput will increase. To start, number of calls and call size are assumed based on future throughput, decreasing the average dwell time for export containers. Additionally, a larger quantity and more advanced equipment is required to handle the increase in throughput. Lastly, the terminal area itself can be increased significantly from 8ha to 22ha in its maximum configuration. The increase in storage area allows the capacity to grow from 50 thousand TEU/year to 215 thousand TEU/year. It is important to realize that further expansion of the terminal is not possible and a new location has to be considered. A multi criteria analysis in combination with a financial analysis on the possible location showed that two out of four possible new locations are suitable for the development of a new container terminal. The new container terminal should have the capacity to handle the expected container throughput generated locally. The possibility to attract additional cargo to the port was researched as well, since the Port of Bahía Blanca has an advantageous depth compared to the Port of Buenos Aires. However, on the short term it is not expected that Bahía Blanca can profit from the draught limitations in Buenos Aires since port calling cost are almost the same, Buenos Aires is located conveniently and not operating at capacity and current shipping routes are not expected to change their routes majorly. ... Read more