30th November 2001

BP Australia's first ever Triple Bottom Line (TBL) report for 2000 is a response to requests from stakeholders for more transparency in the way companies report on their activities.

While the BP group has been producing financial reports since 1948 and environmental and social reports since the 1990's, BP Australia's Triple Bottom Line report is part of BP's experimentation in finding new ways to report on the company's activities and impacts.

The report examines how BP Australia's businesses performed in the three areas of economic, social and environmental performance. BP's Australian companies made a historical cost profit of $A204 million in 2000. Upstream operations performed strongly, marketing made a small profit, and both refining and solar lost money. In the area of social performance, a move away from charitable donations to longer term, more sustainable social investment was begun and significant progress was made in introducing new cleaner fuels to Australia and in reducing emissions to air and water.

TBL reporting is a relatively new phenomenon and there is no established best way of doing it. The report aims to be fully transparent, showing positive and negative opinions on aspects of BP's operations and contains input from external parties. Ernst & Young has reviewed the report and found that BP has evidence to support all of its content.

Commenting on the publication of the report, Greg Bourne, BP Australia's regional president, said; 'To be able to report externally and internally about what we have done in the past year, requires us to look transparently at all of our activities and then build on our strengths and improve our weaknesses.'

'BP is a performance driven company and for us to be able to improve, we need the readers of the report to offer us feedback. That learning will help us to improve performance and transparency and then report back in the next report about what we have done.'

'I'm convinced this report is the beginning of a process which will help us in our goal of continuous improvement, and at the same time improve how we communicate with customers, investors and other stakeholders.'

Click here for full report.
 

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