Goals and Objectives
Please note that this specification is suitable for pre-production pilot implementations.
Informative
Goals & Objectives
UNTP implements traceability technologies that give management teams detailed digital information about upstream suppliers, downstream partners, customers, and their processes. This visibility helps executives meet security, resilience and sustainability objectives, demonstrate regulatory compliance, and obtain provenance and sustainability certifications.
Companies need resilient networks to secure supply in a volatile business environment. Fast-changing consumer preferences demand flexibility and speed. Investors, consumers, and governments expect sustainable products and processes backed by credible certifications. Competing in the next decade requires a transparent, circular value chain—one that reduces or reuses materials and remanufactures or recycles products, cutting costs and waste.
Recommendation 49 sets out the following goals:
- Strengthen national economies and promote sustainable international trade through trustworthy product sustainability claims, corporate sustainability disclosures, and value chain traceability.
- Advance responsible business conduct by enabling risk-based due diligence on environmental, human rights, and social impacts in global value chains.
- Create a level playing field for compliant actors across the value chain.
- Improve export market access and boost competitiveness of domestic products in response to growing sustainability concerns.
- Reduce the complexity, time, and cost of data exchange when validating product conformity with sustainability standards.
- The recommendation also supports other stakeholders working toward sustainable consumption and production (SDG 12) and related goals of the 2030 Agenda, from upstream production through end-of-life disposal and material recovery.
Traceability is also essential for the circular economy. Embedding traceability in the value chain helps recyclers, policymakers, practitioners, and researchers make better decisions. Effective traceability promotes circularity by improving material identification, sorting practices, and industry-wide transparency.
Smaller Actors and Emerging Economies
Two of the Recommendation 49 goals above are about who gets to participate: improving export market access for domestic products, and creating a level playing field for compliant actors. Neither is met if transparency becomes a cost that only large exporters in well-served markets can carry. A due diligence regime that the top tier of a supply chain can satisfy and the bottom tier cannot does not produce transparency; it produces exclusion with better paperwork.
UNTP's answer is not to write a cheaper specification. It is that almost nobody should have to implement it. A smallholder cooperative or a tier-three supplier participates through software that implemented UNTP on their behalf, in the same way they already accept an international payment without implementing ISO 20022. The specification is therefore written to be cheap for the software providers, registries and integrators who implement it, because that is the only cost that gets shared across the millions of actors they serve. This is stated as a requirement, IM.08, and the reasoning is in Who this specification is written for.
Success Measures
UNTP creates real impact only through uptake and implementation. Uptake is therefore the primary measure of success.
UNTP will measure uptake by counting the number of implementations and completed conformity tests—that is, actual implementations. Your active participation is essential. Uptake must exceed the minimum thresholds currently under review.