Contributions to strengthening the UNFC Toolkit: Actionable recommendations from FutuRaM Workpackage 5

The United Nations Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) has endorsed both the United Nations Resource Management System (UNRMS) and the updated United Nations Framework Classification for Resources (UNFC), urging the global application of these frameworks to support sustainable resource management.  Lying at the heart of the UNRMS, the UNFC is used to classify the maturity of raw material and energy projects under development, considering economic, environmental and social aspects of sustainability. Its adoption benefits from specification and guidance documents for application of the UNFC, development and promotion by the UNECE Expert Group on Resource Management, and capacity building activities of the International Centres of Excellence on Sustainable Resource Management (ICE-SRM). These supporting instruments comprise the UNFC toolkit, supporting global deployment of the UNFC in alignment with the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the Paris Agreement.

This report strengthens the UNFC toolkit through the proposal of three actions based on the findings of the FutuRaM project. Action 1 is a call for the next generation of the SARA4UNFC methodology and webtool, which facilitates project classification according to the UNFC by practitioners (chapter 3). Action 2 strives for a common understanding of production forecasts in alignment with the UNFC through the updating of UNFC documents and capacity building among UNFC experts and end-users (chapter 4). Action 3 focuses on the establishment of a technical report template for documenting the information used to classify anthropogenic resource projects (chapter 5).

The report is addressed to the UNECE Expert Group on Resource Management in general and its Anthropogenic Resource Working Group in specific. It is a contribution to strengthen the UNFC toolkit through new developments to meet user needs and therefore pave the way for its wider deployment.