Critical Raw Materials Traceability & Transparency

This repository is used to manage the delivery of the UN/CEFACT CRM Project. Note that technical deliverables such as web vocabularies and credential schema will be managed an published in separate repositories - links will be added here.

Versions & Status

Please refer to the governance page for an explanation of status and version terminology.

Links

Project Purpose

In line with the UN sustainability goals this project proposal seeks to develop a traceability and sustainability framework for critical raw materials (CRM). This project supports the UN focus on extractive industries and builds on the UN/CEFACT role & capabilities to deliver digital standards for sustainable supply chains.

The purpose of this project is to uplift verifiable critical raw materials supply chain resilience and sustainability through digital standards for data and trust.

• Resilient supply chains are designed to avoid risky dependencies and can withstand disruptions.
• Sustainable supply chains are designed to minimize environmental impacts and maximize human welfare.

Both goals are met through traceability and transparency measures that this project will support through standardization.

• There are already many supply chain traceability platforms on the market. None will dominate the world’s supply chains and so must improve their interoperability so that supply chains can be traced across multiple independent platforms.
• There are also many ESG standards and regulations across different industry sectors and geographic jurisdictions. There is significant overlap between the ESG criteria from these standards and so the ability to map ESG claims made against one standard to the criteria defined by another is a key challenge that this project will address.

This is the primary purpose of this project – namely to focus on the exchange of supply chain information between platforms and the alignment of the semantics of ESG claims.

Target Audience

We expect and encourage a wide number of organization types to participate in this project.

• Industry associations and their member organizations in the primary production sector - e.g. miners and refiners of copper, lithium, nickel, cobalt and other critical raw materials.
• Industry associations and the member organizations in manufacturing sectors that are heavy CRM consumers - e.g. battery manufacturers, clean energy, automotive, defense, and electronics industries
• Accreditation authorities and their certifying body members that are auditors and certifiers of CRM supply chain actors.
• ESG standards bodies that define sustainability criteria against which CRM supply chain actors are audited and certified.
• Software providers of solutions that hold traceability & transparency data that will be implementers of the standards delivered by this project.
• National regulators that mandate sustainability criteria for their economies or those that seek to maintain export market access to economies that are mandating such criteria.

Participation in this project is open to any organization. We expect three kinds of participants

• Observers who are not active contributors but nevertheless want to maintain a watching brief on our project, or
• Active contributors to the development of the digital standards or policy recommendations that are the output of this project, or
• Supply chain actors or their software providers that wish be early implementers of the standards defined by this project.