Status: Standard · In review. A proposed disclosure standard under collective review; the field list below is expected to be refined before it is finalized.
The Transparency and Disclosure Standard defines what an impact claim must reveal about itself to be accountable. Its test is a single question: could an independent party who did not produce the claim verify it from what is disclosed? A claim that cannot be checked from its own disclosures is treated as non-conformant, however credible it appears.
Required disclosures
- Sources. The evidence the claim rests on, identified specifically enough to be examined independently.
- Method. How the figure was derived — what was measured, what was assumed, and the counterfactual used to separate impact from activity.
- Provenance. Who measured, and who is accountable for the claim, expressed through the Chain of Accountability.
- Scope and boundaries. What the claim covers and, equally, what it excludes — the edges of the measurement.
- Confidence and maturity. How certain the claim is, which parts are verified versus estimated, and the maturity of the method behind it — musing, theory, or law.
- The full ledger. Both value created and 0TRUECOST. Reporting only positive impact is a conformance failure, not a matter of emphasis.
Conformance
A claim is conformant when every required field is present and legible to an outside reader. A missing field is not a stylistic gap; it is the precise point at which the claim stops being checkable. The standard deliberately treats selective disclosure — publishing the benefit while withholding the cost or the method — as the principal failure mode it exists to prevent.
Relationship to the other instruments
The standard governs how any figure produced under the Impact Measurement Protocol, the Counterfactual Toolkit, or the Regeneration Index is presented. It introduces no measurement of its own; it constrains how measurements are communicated, so that the strength of the evidence travels with the number.
Status
The standard is in review. Its intent is fixed — no accountable claim without disclosed sources, method, provenance, and stated limits — but the exact field list, and the threshold at which a claim is judged conformant, are still being settled in the open.