A combination of sustainability-related regulations and increased demand from stakeholders has pressed firms to adequately address sustainability-related risks. This issue is particularly important, and challenging, for the freight transportation sector due to its exposure to a large number of inherent sustainability risks. Despite the growing significance of sustainability risks, there is a lack of research related to sustainability risk management, which may be due to the difficulties in identifying and evaluating sustainability risks. We aim to fill this research gap by identifying, measuring and modelling sustainability risks in the context of freight transportation. Our research makes three primary contributions. First, we introduce the concept of a sustainability risk index (SRI) to understand the risk exposure of freight transportation systems (FTSs) in the context of India, an emerging market. The SRI is a mathematical tool used to measure sustainability risks andto quantify a firm’s exposure to sustainability-related risks. Second, we propose an integrated two-phase model based on an interval 2-tuple linguistic model and a digraph matrix approach to calculate the SRI. In contrast to other existing techniques, the proposed approach can effectively deal with uncertain and incomplete linguistic assessments without suffering a loss of information. Third, we propose a framework for calculating both the disruption scores and influencing power of sustainability risks to evaluate the associated criticality and triggering power. For a robustness check, we also conduct a sensitivity analysis of the impact of risk variations on the SRI. Unlike conventional perceptions, our results show that organisational and governmental risks, which are mostly behavioural and skills-induced, are more significant for sustainable FTSs compared to financial risks. Our research helps the managerial community in thefreight transportation sector in emerging markets to engage in more informed decision-making to proactively mitigate sustainability risks, which have potentially devastating financial, environmental and societal impacts.

与可持续发展相关的法规与利益相关方需求的增加相结合，迫使企业充分应对与可持续发展相关的风险。由于货运行业面临大量固有的可持续发展风险，因此对于货运行业而言，这一问题尤其重要且具有挑战性。尽管可持续性风险的重要性日益提高，但仍缺乏与可持续性风险管理相关的研究，这可能是由于难以识别和评估可持续性风险所致。我们旨在通过识别，衡量和建模货运背景下的可持续发展风险来填补这一研究空白。我们的研究做出了三个主要贡献。第一的，我们引入可持续发展风险指数（SRI）的概念，以了解在新兴市场印度的背景下货运系统（FTS）的风险敞口。SRI是一种数学工具，用于衡量可持续发展风险并量化公司面临的可持续发展相关风险。其次，我们提出了一种基于区间2元组语言模型和有向图矩阵方法的综合两阶段模型，以计算SRI。与其他现有技术相比，所提出的方法可以有效地处理不确定的和不完整的语言评估，而不会丢失信息。第三，我们提出了一个框架，用于计算破坏分数和可持续性风险的影响力，以评估相关的临界度和触发力。为了进行健壮性检查，我们还对风险变化对SRI的影响进行了敏感性分析。与传统观念不同，我们的结果表明，与金融风险相比，组织和政府的风险（主要是行为和技能引起的）对可持续的FTS更为重要。我们的研究帮助新兴市场的货运运输行业的管理人员做出更明智的决策，以主动降低可能对金融，环境和社会造成破坏性影响的可持续性风险。