The book serves as a guide in the design and preparation of an investment project, in effect a roadmap for producing a project study and plan, and for arriving at an investment decision. It alerts investors and other stakeholders to precipitous changes in the investment milieu as a result of resource constraints (mainly fossil energy), political turmoil (one manifestation is international terrorism) and population growth, and the need to design their projects accordingly. The authors suggest expanding the vista to include what we have called the wider domain of economic, political and ecological factors as universally relevant to the design of projects large and small, and in private and public sectors. They point to the often overlooked fact that even in situations where a project is designed for finite life, the investment milieu of which the project is a part has no temporal boundary - since successor opportunities in future reinvestment rounds will demand resources, it is prudent to design the project so that it relies to the maximum extent on sustainable consumption, which studies show to be not only environmentally beneficial, but good business in both the manufacturing process and in goods and services produced for industry and for public consumption. The book is a guide for investors and other stakeholders in the methods of designing and appraising investment projects in private and public sectors. Sections in the book identify the scope of issues to be addressed. It includes real life case studies featuring spreadsheet layouts and computations, complement descriptions of specific methods of analysis.
