Mapping ESG evolution in Brazilian ports: A text-mining approach to sustainability reporting

Abstract

The alignment of port sustainability governance with international maritime policy frameworks requires ports to move beyond compliance-oriented reporting towards substantive climate performance disclosure. This study investigates the evolution of ESG disclosures in Brazilian ports and terminals over 2018-2024, examining whether reporting patterns reflect substantive sustainability integration or legitimacy-oriented discursive alignment. A text-mining approach is applied to 87 sustainability reports issued by the 16 throughput-dominant operators that jointly account for 76.6% of Brazil's cargo throughput. An open mapping analysis extracts the 100 most frequent terms per year and visualises co-occurrence networks using Python and VOSviewer. A controlled vocabulary of 398 search expressions, constructed from established public reference frameworks, validated through independent double coding (Cohen's kappa = 0.88) and corroborated by Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic modelling, measures term frequencies across five ESG dimensions: governance; operational efficiency and safety; climate change and energy transition; social responsibility and stakeholder engagement; and port–city and environmental interface. The findings reveal persistent dominance of governance and Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) compliance vocabulary, while climate-related language remains structurally marginal, a pattern consistent with legitimacy-oriented disclosure and mimetic isomorphism under neo-institutional theory and robust to conglomerate reports, network thresholds and the public-private split. Two findings sharpen the picture: disclosure intensity shows only a weak and statistically non-significant association with port size, indicating that Brazil's largest throughput-dominant operators are not necessarily its climate-reporting leaders; and the governance-over-climate imbalance is widest among public port authorities, precisely where public accountability is greatest. This misalignment with the International Maritime Organization's (IMO) 2050 decarbonisation pathway matters for maritime regulators, and the validated five-cluster taxonomy offers a replicable benchmarking instrument for emerging-economy port systems.