As global regulations on corporate responsibility evolve at an unprecedented pace, a critical question is emerging: Can voluntary standards offer the stability that businesses need to navigate the unknown?

From the European Union’s Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD) to U.S. and EU bans on goods linked to forced labor, the regulatory landscape is becoming increasingly fragmented. Meanwhile, countries across Asia and Africa are piloting new ESG disclosure frameworks. For companies, the challenge is not only to comply with a growing patchwork of laws but also to meet rising societal expectations that often outpace legislation. In this context, voluntary standards are gaining renewed attention, not as substitutes for regulation, but as complementary, strategic tools that help navigate uncertainty.

A compass in uncharted territory

In the absence of a unified global framework, responsible business today resembles navigation without a map. Legal requirements vary widely across jurisdictions and may even conflict. What is mandatory in one country may be voluntary, or entirely absent, in another. Voluntary standards offer a kind of compass. Developed through multi-stakeholder collaboration, they provide companies with structured approaches to ethical and sustainable practices. These standards are not static; they evolve in response to emerging risks and stakeholder input, often adapting faster than laws and anticipating regulatory trends by years.

Despite their growing importance, voluntary standards are often misunderstood. One misconception is that once a facility passes an audit, its responsibility is fulfilled. But audits are just one component of effective due diligence and continuous improvement as they are snapshots in time and limited in scope. Audits serve as an independent, retroactive review and validation of systems and practices; they are an important but targeted step in what must be an ongoing cycle of risk monitoring and management. Considering the dynamic nature of complex supply chains or high-risk sourcing, companies and standards systems must have systems to monitor risks between periodic audits.

The mining sector illustrates this well. Issues such as tailings dam safety, water contamination, and community relations require ongoing vigilance. In response, some companies are now integrating real time monitoring tools, from satellite imagery to IoT sensors into their risk management systems. Industry reporting highlights miners linking IoT sensors to real time maps and using AI to process those feeds for early warning. As corporate accountability shifts from retroactive reporting to real-time transparency, technology is playing a central role. For instance, IoT sensors can monitor environmental conditions in real time. AI can analyse vast datasets to flag potential labour abuses or environmental degradation. These technologies enable more proactive oversight.

Data integrity: the backbone of tech-enabled standards

As voluntary standards evolve into dynamic systems powered by real-time technologies, one element quietly underpins their credibility: data. The shift from static assessments to continuous oversight hinges not just on the tools we use, but on the integrity of the information they generate. Without trustworthy data, even the most advanced ESG technologies risk becoming noise rather than insight.

Data is rapidly becoming the backbone of credible ESG performance, but its value depends on integrity, interoperability, and trust. As companies embed IoT sensors, satellite feeds, and AI analytics into their ESG systems, the challenge is no longer just collecting data, but ensuring it is accurate, tamper-proof, and comparable across platforms. Fragmented or siloed data can erode the very trust these technologies are meant to build.

To unlock the full potential of real-time insights, companies need interoperable data platforms, and systems that align with recognized standards and enable seamless sharing across supply chains. Without a coherent data strategy, even the most advanced tools risk generating a flood of information with little accountability or impact.
At present, data interoperability remains a major gap, even for basic elements like assessment results and chain of custody information. Without alignment across systems, ESG data risks becoming fragmented, inconsistent, and difficult to verify.

This undermines the very trust that digital tools are meant to build. That is why the Responsible Minerals Initiative (RMI) is advancing the UN Transparency Protocol framework, a unified ESG data architecture (not another proprietary tool) designed to define the rules for data exchange and promote transparency, comparability, and responsible sourcing across the mineral value chain, allowing users to opt-in and decide what data to share and with whom to share it.

By anchoring live data streams in an interoperable, shared framework, the goal is to transform raw information into actionable intelligence and leverage voluntary standards to inform adaptive systems that can evolve with the risks they are meant to manage.

Navigating the Future

In a world where the regulatory map is still being drawn, voluntary standards offer a vital navigational tool. But they are not a panacea. A sustainable future will require both compasses and maps; voluntary frameworks complemented by effective legal systems, multistakeholder governance and the use of technology.
Yet technology has its limits. It can measure emissions, but not injustice. It can detect anomalies, but not whether a worker feels safe or a community has lost its rights. Here, voluntary standards have an important role in credibly - and collaboratively – defining criteria which translate data into an assessment of good practice.

For voluntary standards to remain credible, they must integrate data and digital innovation without losing the human oversight, ethical judgment, and public reporting that underpin meaningful accountability and effective due diligence. Multistakeholder design and governance of voluntary standards are critical to ensure that industry, government, rightsholders, and other stakeholders have compasses calibrated to the same direction.
Far from being a fallback, voluntary standards should be seen as a form of strategic foresight. They allow companies to prepare for or even exceed regulatory requirements. In areas such as responsible sourcing, labour rights, and climate risk, voluntary frameworks have frequently defined good practice long before laws caught up. However, as voluntary standards typically engage only a portion of a sector, it is useful to consider the value of the relationship between voluntary and mandatory systems.

The implementation and impact of standards can be expanded and expedited in an ecosystem with common sense, harmonized regulations. Together, public and private tools can create a more resilient and equitable system which rewards leadership while ensuring a level playing field.

This article was originally published in The Digital Mining Pulse | Issue 2 | September 2025