Readers of NATA News will be aware of the longstanding support provided by NATA for trade digitalisation efforts at the United Nations Centre for Trade Facilitation and E-Business (UN/CEFACT). NATA’s Brett Hyland currently leads the Conformity Group established within their flagship program, the United Nations Transparency Protocol (UNTP). A new milestone was reached on 14 May, with the UNTP Specification now open for Public Comment.
UNTP is a global interoperability protocol that enables sustainability-related information to be discoverable, linkable, and verifiable across value chains. It supports trusted data exchange, streamlined compliance, and scalable transparency across global value chains.
The public review, which is open until 13 July 2026, is an important step toward the adoption of UNTP as a global data exchange standard and offers stakeholders across sectors the opportunity to help shape the foundation for trusted, scalable transparency.
Sustainability information is abundant, but it is not yet usable at scale. Data exists across supply chains: facilities report emissions, companies publish sustainability claims, products carry labels. Yet, this information remains fragmented – locked in separate systems, inconsistent formats, and disconnected from one another. This is not a data problem. It is an interoperability problem. UNTP provides a common approach for making sustainability data machine-readable, verifiable, and linkable across systems – without centralising it or requiring organisations to give up control.
The verifiable and interoperable exchange of sustainability data is becoming increasingly important for legal compliance as well. Regulatory frameworks aimed at supporting national or regional commitments to Sustainable Development Goals depend on access to credible upstream data. However, whether this can be achieved in practice will depend on the utility of the underlying data infrastructure, which the UNTP is intended to address.
Comment is sought from technical experts, implementers, certifiers, regulators, sector specialists and all organizations with an interest in verifiable sustainability and traceability data.
Review the UNTP: https://untp.unece.org/docs/about/