A frontier‐based managerial approach for relative sustainability performance assessment of the world's airports

The sustainability impact of air transportation has become crucial to communities. Airports around the world are forced to be transparent with the society and to declare their sustainability results. As the sustainability goals and objectives and due to its multi‐dimension aspects that are needed to be decided of and subsequently improved, the decision has been taken, and the parameters have been selected due to its significance in this field. This research presents a managerial approach combining the optimization‐based frontier approach with the Global Report Initiative's comprehensive sustainability database for selected 30 major international airports based on data availability. In this regard, eco‐efficiency analysis is carried out with four different models using input‐oriented modeling with multiple undesirable environmental inputs (energy, carbon, water, and waste) and desirable outputs (revenue, passenger and employment) to compare efficiency and sustainability levels of airports in different contexts. Finally, performance improvement targets of each environmental indicators are presented for the airports. These comparative models reveal different frontier airports, which provide the opportunity to analyze diversified reference points for the same decision‐making unit. The presented statistical study has shown that San Francisco, Hong Kong, Hamad International Airport are the most efficient airports in terms of overall sustainability performance based on collected data and selected indicators. The authors also concluded that there is a discrepancy in sustainability data reporting between airports, and there is a need for collecting complete, consistent and real‐time social, environmental, economic, and governance data, to better compare and evaluate the performance of each airport from a sustainability perspective.