Sustainability Strategy Commitments

UKOOA Sustainability Strategy 2002 - First Report 5. Key Processes Supporting the Delivery of our Contribution to Sustainable Development   Commitment No. 59 - Sustainability indicators, targets, annual review We will develop a set of numeric and qualitative key indicators to help us measure our industrys sustainable development performance.  We will assess in which cases a targeted approach is useful in driving future performance and develop an annual review process to monitor performance against our plans.  Some initial indicators have been established and are included in this document.  With the benefit of new learning and reviewing new and updated data, we aim to produce a more complete sustainable development scorecard by end 2001. Progress to date : achievements and difficulties encountered While the industry has a number of targets to meet within its 2001 sustainability strategy, we have yet to complete the work to set these within the broader context of long term sustainability, with fewer, higher level indicators, some of them linked to goals.   We plan to finalise this by year-end. Cross industry meetings have now taken place to exchange indicator work at company level {see for example BP box below} and to brainstorm on the most relevant potential indicators for the sector.  Some of the final set of key indicators are likely to be 'temperature-taking' type indicators which enable assessment of SD contribution in that area (e.g. employment by region), while others are likely to be more appropriate as measures of company (and sectoral) performance.  The key criteria we have developed for indicator selection include: Describe significant impacts Simple to understand and credibly related to the impact Both leading and lag indicators May include some delivery or process indicators Some balance between our four pillars of sustainable development Data availability and confidence in accuracy If possible independently verifiable or published by independent source Widely adopted to enable comparability outside the sector With regard to the latter criterion, we have examined indicators used or proposed at national or international level - with particular emphasis on the UK Quality of Life indicators (www.sustainable-development.gov.uk), the sectoral indicators suggested by the UK Sustainable Development Commission in the context of the work of the UK Pioneers Group, existing reporting to International Association of Oil & Gas Producers (OGP) and the proposals of the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI). The debate over this last year around this issue of sectoral targets has focussed on environmental goal setting.  This included a session held in January with environment staff from DTI's Oil and Gas Office.  The original UKOOA principle (developed with DTI and DETR in 1999 was for "continual improvement of the industry's offshore environmental performance, ...guided as far as practicable by long-term goal setting, considering all emission streams holistically; methods for achieving environmental goals should be flexible, appropriate to the asset life cycle, and promote innovation rather than relying on compliance against prescriptive standards or technologies".   A number of issues have arisen in considering how this principle can be implemented in practice, summarised under Commitment No.37. BOX: BP's experience of developing sustainable development assessment tools Over the last two years BP has been supporting the development of methodologies and indicators to assess its contribution to sustainable development. This has resulted in a number of different approaches to how best to conceptualise the issues of sustainable development for a project-driven business. The various tools developed have resulted in rich learnings on the strengths and limitations of different approaches. One tool assesses the alignment of a project with key principles of sustainable development by scoring these on a range of weak to strong. Another looks at the sustainability of a project through a full life cycle analysis (including impacts of the product) translated into a single overall monetary measure. Another assesses the SD impacts of the main BP operations - offshore exploration and production, refining, chemicals, and retail, and how these are likely to change over time with different business scenarios. Among the learnings from these exercises are the need to define clearly the scope of the indicator, the need to indicate progress towards a sustainable society (and not just sustaining the business), the inadequacies of a number of indicators which need to act as proxies for SD areas, and the need to align data collection to fit the new metrics. The work now being done by UKOOA builds on individual company learnings such as these. Next commitment [60. Annual integrated reporting on sustainability issues] Previous commitment [58. Pipelines and cables] Commitment listing

Sustainability Strategy Commitments