Epoch Virtual Standards Catalog

A normalised crosswalk of global sustainability-disclosure regulation

Shared with Trase. Snapshot generated 15 June 2026. An interactive viewer is in preparation; this document and the accompanying data export are the current reference.

What it is

The Virtual Standards Catalog reads every sustainability-disclosure obligation that matters from primary sources, normalises them into a single comparable structure, and reduces them to the underlying set of measurements a company actually has to collect.

For any data point it answers three questions:

1. What is the single most-stringent requirement across every framework that covers it.
2. How does that data point map across every relevant standard, down to the verbatim clause and citation.
3. What do you collect once to satisfy many: the small set of measurements that feed obligations across dozens of frameworks.

Headline figures

Of the 863 points: 480 mandatory, 105 conditional, 11 comply-or-explain, 363 voluntary. 289 are quantitative metrics and 47 are site-level or geospatial.

Largest topics by disclosure count: business conduct and governance (263), climate and GHG (189), biodiversity and ecosystems (106), value-chain workers (80), water (42), pollution (38).

Coverage

Obligations concentrate in the EU, with a widening ring of national regimes and a global voluntary layer that applies in every market.

Commodity scope

Every disclosure row is tagged with the commodities it applies to, so a producer or trader reports against the union of its commodity-specific standards plus the commodity-agnostic corporate frameworks.

The taxonomy is built around the EUDR-7 (cattle, cocoa, coffee, oil palm, rubber, soy, wood) with an extension set (sugarcane, cotton, seafood and others). Alongside the corporate frameworks, the catalog covers the commodity scheme standards directly, including RSPO, RTRS, Bonsucro, Better Cotton, FSC and PEFC, Fairtrade Cocoa, 4C, ProTerra, ASC and MSC, and LWG.

This makes the catalog directly usable for commodity supply-chain work: for a given commodity you can read the binding disclosure bar across regulation and certification in one place.

Collect once, report many

The 863 disclosures collapse onto a small set of measurements. A handful of primitives carry a large share of the corpus.

The most universal single disclosures recur across many frameworks, so they are collected once and reported everywhere: gross Scope 3 GHG emissions (10 frameworks), management of material topics (8), climate / GHG reduction targets (8), a Paris-aligned 1.5°C transition plan (7), gross Scope 2 GHG emissions (7), and total Scopes 1+2+3 (7).

The geospatial primitives are computed from site location. A single land-cover and deforestation computation, for example, feeds disclosures across EUDR, TNFD, ESRS E4 and CDP at once.

Why it matters

• The regulatory surface is vast but finite and converging. Three GHG-scope measurements feed roughly 90 disclosures across 13 to 15 frameworks each; the remainder resolves to about 85 further primitives.
• Most-stringent is computed, not guessed. For every data point the catalog names the binding, quantitative, site-level bar to meet, so collecting to that specification clears the whole field and the gap to close is explicit.
• Audit-ready provenance. 92% of points are cited verbatim to primary legal sources, with a full trail for every cross-framework link and primitive mapping.

What is included with this document

• Epoch-Compliance-Catalog-Overview.md — this overview.
• catalog_export.json — the full machine-readable graph (72 frameworks, 17 topics, 88 primitives). For each data point: the most-stringent clause and source URL; for each primitive: every disclosure it feeds across frameworks. Intended for downstream tooling.
• commodities.yaml — the commodity taxonomy used to scope disclosures.

An interactive, login-gated viewer covering most-stringent, gap-to-close, cross-standard mapping and the collect-once primitive graph for any data point is in preparation and will follow.