In line with the UN sustainability goals and building on the success of the Textile & Leather traceability project, this project proposal seeks to develop a traceability and sustainability framework for critical raw materials (CRM¹). This project supports the UN focus on extractive industries (https://www.un.org/sg/en/content/sg/statement/2021-05-25/secretary-generals-remarks-the-global-roundtable-transforming-extractive-industries-for-sustainable-development-delivered) 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 maximise 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.  This is the primary purpose of this project – namely to focus on the exchange of supply chain information between platforms.

 This project will

·        Leverage the experience from the UN/CEFACT textile & leather project (https://unece.org/sites/default/files/2022-01/ECE-TRADE-463E.pdf) but also accommodate the lessons learned (for example that there are 1000’s of platforms for traceability but what matters for complex supply chains is interoperability between platforms).

·        Leverage the recent UN/CEFACT project deliverables including the recommendations on digital trust using verifiable credentials (https://unece.org/sites/default/files/2022-09/WhitePaper_VerifiableCredentials-CBT.pdf) as well as the representation of UN/CEFACT semantics as a modern web vocabulary (https://vocabulary.uncefact.org/)

·        Leverage the experience of participating nations in their various national and subnational efforts to digitalise their CRM supply chains, whether as producer or consumer.  One example is the British Columbia Ministry of Energy, Mines and Low Carbon Innovation work on digital trust.

·        Work with existing industry groups and consortia that are working in the CRM space.

·        Ensure that the framework includes sufficient digital trust so that sustainability claims associated with critical minerals supply chains can be verified and trusted, thereby tackling the increasing incidence of greenwashing and mass-balance fraud.

·        Be specific about the role of national and subnational governments and accreditation authorities as “trust anchors” in the network of supply chain actors.

·        Ensure that the framework supports both supply chain sustainability and resilience goals of producer and consumer economies.

·        Deliver a cross-border traceability framework for CRM that provides the necessary standards guidance to permit end-to-end critical minerals digital traceability across different commercial and national boundaries – for example from lithium mine to rechargeable battery.

·        Test the framework via proof-of-concept implementations between at least three nations.