Measuring the sustainability performance of infrastructure projects under the Belt and Road Initiative

Some of the major infrastructure projects are built under the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). BRI is a socio-economic initiative with the aim of fostering collaboration between China and other developing countries in Asia, Africa, Europe and South America by developing infrastructure, increasing trade, cooperation, and cultural and educational exchange. Such ambitious infrastructure projects could cause environmental degradation, pollution, and impact biodiversity. Hence, the aims of this paper are to assess the sustainability performance of BRI projects and identify the critical indicators. In total, a list of 31 indicators is categorised under three pillars of sustainability, environmental, economic and social. A model based on experts’ judgment and a fuzzy synthetic evaluation approach is developed, and a sensitivity analysis is applied to detect the critical indicators. The results show that the most critical indicators are: infrastructure development and provision of facilities, job opportunities, effects on local development, workers’ safety on the construction site, effects on the national economy, and public comfort. On the other hand, indicators belonging to the environmental dimension have the least sustainability performance. The proposed sustainability assessment model is efficient and reliable for measuring the sustainability performance of complex projects and can be applied to other projects.