United Nations Transparency Protocol (UNTP)

GoSource led the design of the United Nations Transparency Protocol, creating an open and interoperable architecture for trusted digital supply chain transparency at global scale.

Challenge

Greenwashing is rampant worldwide, with as many as 70% of product sustainability claims found to be fake or misleading. Regulations are being enacted globally — notably in the European Union — demanding increased transparency at both corporate disclosure and product levels, with verifiable evidence to support sustainability claims. These regulations present market access barriers for exporters and expose importers to significant compliance and reputational risk. While supply chain transparency and traceability is the recognised solution, most efforts have never scaled beyond low-volume pilots because they depend on multiple actors contributing data to a centralised platform — an approach that cannot scale across global supply chains with diverse actors and competing interests.

Solution

GoSource contributed senior architect Steve Capell as leader of a UN project to develop a scalable architecture for global supply chain transparency. A team of approximately 80 experts from around 20 countries was assembled to collaborate on solving this global challenge under the UN’s Open Development Process, making the solution freely available as a UN output.

The scalability challenge was answered through a decentralised linked-data architecture where each supply chain actor maintains their own data and issues a Digital Product Passport (DPP) for each shipped product, discoverable from the product identifier. End-to-end traceability is achieved by following links from passport to passport using resolvable identifiers. All DPPs are both human and machine readable to accommodate actors with differing technology maturity.

The trust challenge was addressed using W3C Verifiable Credentials for tamper-proofing, third-party sustainability certificates linked to DPPs as evidence of sustainable behaviour, and strong digital identity credentials to prevent counterfeiting. The combination of these protocols provides a scalable trust architecture for sustainable global trade.

Outcomes

• Global standard published: The UNTP is now a complete set of open specifications and conformance criteria that can be independently implemented by any system or supply chain actor
• Cross-industry interoperability: UNTP provides an interoperable core that can be extended by any industry sector or nation without breaking cross-industry or cross-border interoperability
• Successful implementations: Successfully implemented in the agriculture sector for Australian trade with the EU, and in the critical minerals sector for Canadian minerals used by Chinese battery manufacturers supplying EU markets
• EU endorsement: The European Commission expects UNTP to solve compliance challenges faced by EU industry by providing high-integrity upstream product data meeting due diligence obligations
• UN policy backing: A supporting UN policy document (UNECE Recommendation 49) provides guidance to nations on UNTP implementation
• 80 experts, 20 countries: Assembled and led a global collaboration of leading domain experts

Technologies & Methods

• Decentralised linked-data architecture
• W3C Verifiable Credentials standard
• Digital Product Passports (DPPs) — human and machine readable
• Resolvable identifiers for end-to-end traceability
• Anti-counterfeiting protocols (digital identity credentials)
• Open specifications and conformance criteria
• UN Open Development Process (collaborative standards development)

Team Size

~80 contributing experts from ~20 countries (GoSource providing technical leadership)

Ethical Considerations

UNTP is a protocol designed to give unsustainable behaviour nowhere to hide. GoSource made the deliberate ethical choice to contribute an anti-counterfeiting protocol to the UN as a public good rather than patent it as proprietary intellectual property. The GoSource vision is to deliver digital solutions that have a material impact on the wellbeing of people and the environment, which often drives the choice between more profitable work and work that benefits society. By placing UNTP under UN governance, the intellectual property belongs to the global community and is freely available to all.