Here is an overview of some of the key challenges taken into consideration as the UNTP has been developed, and how it answers those challenges:

Challenge: A plethora of platforms for traceability

The idea of providing traceability through digital information across supply chains isn't new. There are hundreds, maybe thousands of platforms to choose from.

Many of them have a model where they expect participants along the entire supply chain to provide traceability data to that platform so that an end-to-end picture can be constructed.

That may sound reasonable at first, but when you think about it you quickly realise that that's not going to scale to global levels.

ANSWER: UNTP is a protocol not a platform

The UNTP is not another IT system. It aims to establish a protocol for traceability data to move between platforms so that any actor in the supply chain can pick any platform they like or any tool they like as long as it conforms to an interoperability protocol. The UNTP is defining standards and protocols to connect them together. That means leaving data where it is but linking it together when it's needed using decentralised events. Use any software you like so long as it conforms to UNTP.

Challenge: Business Incentives for Sustainability– or lack thereof

Common industry practice today is to use industry averages for up-stream supply chain sustainability performance. But this effectively remove all incentives. Why would an upstream supplier improve product sustainability if downstream buyers don't differentiate?

ANSWER: The UNTP passport is a bundle of differentiated value

ESG performance can only improve with informed and differentiated supply decisions. Digital Product Passport (DPP) claims are categorised for easy International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) mapping. There's a passport for every shipment of goods.

The UN is working to ensure that traceability and transparency protocols that are developed at the UN allow for any available margin or incentive to be available and spread through the supply chain so that each actor along the supply chain is incentivised to change their behaviour.

Challenge: Greenwashing and Due Diligence

Greenwashing is already endemic. Research from the European Commission revealed that 53% of green claims give vague, misleading or unfounded information while 40% have no supporting evidence. Just as the incentives to behave sustainably are increasing, so the same incentives will increase the motivation to get away with being deceitful. Differentiated supply decisions will provide even stronger incentives to make false claims. Due diligence regulations may impose liabilities on organisations for false claims from their suppliers. How can sufficient trust be added to the system?

ANSWER: UNTP includes verifiable conformity evidence

The UNTP offers digital product conformity credentials

• Developed in conjunction with national accreditation authorities and conformity assessment bodies
• Secured using W3C Verifiable credential technology
• Linked to passport and supports 2nd party, 3rd party, formal, & informal verification

Challenge: Commercial Confidentiality

Whilst "sunlight is the best auditor", increased transparency also increases risk of leakage of commercially sensitive information. What one party considers confidential, another may not.

It's easy to understand how an actor is willing to share data between their immediate suppliers and their immediate customers but as soon as you step one or two steps beyond that there's a risk that confidential information starts to leak into the supply chain.

Actors are generally going to be very reserved about participating in end-to-end traceability if they're not confident that confidential information can be protected.

This necessitates a protocol that empowers every actor along the supply chain to choose their own balance between traceability and confidentiality and share data when it delivers material value to do so.

ANSWER: UNTP includes a privacy & security toolkit

At the heart of it, the UNTP Recommendation 49 is the idea of a simple business-to-business Digital Product Passport containing just enough information for the next step in the supply chain to leverage it.

UNTP provides six tools that allow UNTP implementers to choose their own balance between confidentiality and transparency.

Challenge: Inequality in terms of Digital maturity and Adoption from market to market

UNTP is a digital protocol. If it only worked when every supply chain actor is digitally mature and connected, then nobody would get on board.

ANSWER: UNTP allows implementation without dependency

There's no need for system-to-system connections between actors. Data is discoverable from products and is BOTH human and machine-readable. Whether it's a manual process of simply scanning the barcode, a human experience of clicking through evidence, or a machine following the same evidence, all will work equally well.

Challenge: Compatibility with Existing Product Identifiers

Industries use well-established identifier schemes (e.g. GS1 GTINs) that one actor cannot change without impacting others. Imposing any transparency scheme that requires new product identifiers or registers would present an enormous barrier.

ANSWER: UNTP leverages existing identifiers and link resolvers

Rich UNTP data is linked-to and discoverable-from existing industry identifiers, even when they are simple 1-D barcodes. UNTP requires registry operators to add one simple URL per customer to point to that customers link service.

Challenge: Too many sets of standards and regulations

There is a mountain of standards and regulations. There are maybe 300 or 400 industry-led ESG standards in agri-food and textile and leather alone, plus hundreds and soon to be thousands of emerging items of regulation all around the world. That's a bewildering challenge to any producer in any market particularly when that producer is looking to sell goods to export markets and has to meet the compliance requirements of each market.

ANSWER: UNTP Separates Data from the Assessment of that Data

UNTP will simplify that plethora of standards, make sense of claims that are made in one country so they're understandable in another, and keep that assessment simple by separating the facts from the assessment of those facts.

Challenge: the UNTP cannot address every single sector's specific requirements

ANSWER: UNTP is designed as a common core that is usable by any industry sector or in any regulatory jurisdiction. An extensions methodology has been established that describes how to extend UNTP to meet the specific needs of any industry sector or regulated market in such a way that the extension maintains core interoperability with any other extension. This cross-industry and cross-border interoperability is a core value of UNTP because almost every value chain will cross industry and/or national borders. https://uncefact.github.io/spec-untp/docs/extensions/ExtensionsMethodology/

Challenge: Complexity and Price

This whole landscape is complex, compliance can be quite expensive, and there needs to be a clear business motivation to drive sustainability efforts. Benefit has to be higher than costs for anyone to take action.

ANSWER: The UN protocol is so simple that implementation is trivial and relatively cheap.

The traceability and transparency protocols that are being developed at the UN are really simple, cheap, implementable, can work at scale and have an almost negligible cost impact. Any available margin or incentive is available and spread through the supply chain so that each actor along the supply chain is incentivised to change their behaviour.

Challenge: Identity fraud, counterfeiting, mass balance fraud

In global trade, verifying the authenticity of products and the legitimacy of claims is a persistent challenge. Fraudulent activities such as identity theft, counterfeit goods, and manipulation of mass balance calculations undermine trust and transparency across supply chains.

ANSWER: UNTP Utilises Trust Graphs and Trust Anchors

The UN Transparency Protocol (UNTP) addresses these issues by implementing trust graphs and trust anchors. Trust graphs establish verifiable links between entities, products, and credentials, enabling stakeholders to trace the origin and authenticity of information. A Trust Anchor is a root source of trust in a digital verification system — like a certification body, a registry, or an accreditation authority that others rely on to vouch for claims or identities. In the trust graph, it's the entity at the top of a chain whose assertions are considered inherently trustworthy (or at least worth verifying downstream).

By leveraging these mechanisms, UNTP enhances the ability to detect and prevent fraudulent activities, ensuring that each claim or credential can be traced back to a trusted source. This approach not only bolsters the integrity of supply chain data but also facilitates interoperability across different systems and jurisdictions.

Importantly, UNTP's design does not render existing traceability platforms obsolete. Instead, these platforms can integrate with UNTP's trust architecture, hosting or discovering trust graphs and rendering verifiable credentials for their users.

The UN/CEFACT Transparency Protocol (UNTP) aims to solve these challenges and take us from a few hard-work pilots to global adoption at scale.

Got questions or want to dive deeper into the UNTP and the challenges it's built to solve?

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