Author ORCID Identifier
0000-0002-3323-9419
Document Type
Theses, Ph.D
Disciplines
Transport engineering, Urban studies (Planning and development), Transport planning and social aspects of transport
Abstract
Sustainability assessment in city logistics has been a perpetual and salient agenda among city managers and logistics industry practitioners, especially in light of the promotion of the new Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) and European Sustainability Reporting Standards (ESRS). Research studies to date have tried to assess city logistics operations’ sustainability performance and their impact, but most endeavours have ended in vain due to elusive sustainability goals, inconsistent indicator quality, ambiguous stakeholder responsibility, and poor data availability on city levels.
To address these challenges, this study is advocating for a collaborative sustainability reporting and assessment process among public and private stakeholders in city logistics. An interdisciplinary approach is adopted by proposing a Design Thinking based 'Define-Design-Develop-Deploy' 4D Stage Model to bridge the sustainability and city logistics theoretical gaps. This 4D Stage Model serves as a methodological pathway throughout the thesis.
Embracing a strong sustainability paradigm, a conceptual Global Reporting Initiative (GRI)-augmented indicator framework was constructed based on literature review and document analysis of 26 logistics companies’ sustainability reports. An exploratory sequential mixed-method approach was conducted to explore sustainability phenomena in the city logistics context. First, a two-round Delphi survey of 50 city logistics experts in Europe was carried out to capture stakeholders’ perceptions of sustainable city logistics and measurements. Subsequently, a PROMETHEE outranking analysis was conducted to further test the robustness and applicability of the indicators. A comparative analysis of ten selected European capital cities was performed using secondary data.
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21427/0sta-t816
Recommended Citation
Zhang, X. (2024). Road to Sustainability: Developing a Sustainability Performance Measurement Framework for City Logistics from a Multi-Stakeholder Perspective. Technological University Dublin.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share Alike 4.0 International License.
Publication Details
A doctoral thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the award of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, Technological University Dublin, July 2024.