ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the development by British Petroleum (BP) (in collaboration with others) of an accounting tool for ‘making sense’ of the extent to which its operations could be said to be in accordance with the principles of sustainable development (SD). The accounting tool that has been developed is called the Sustainability Assessment Model (SAM). In brief, SAM seeks to track significant economic, resource, environmental and social impacts of a project over its full life cycle and then to translate these impacts into a common measurement basis – that of money. The outcome of this process is to produce both a graphical representation of the positive and negative impacts (we call this the SAM ‘signature’), as well as the construction of an indicator (the SAMi) of how well the particular project performs (which itself could be used to benchmark different projects). This information may then be fed back into project evaluation processes, either to inform the (re)design of the project or to feed into future project planning processes.
