What 18 first movers taught us about cooperation in a fragmented world

This year, 18 real battery value chains agreed to do something that is becoming increasingly difficult: share supply chain information, test common sustainability rules and submit the results to independent scrutiny.

The companies taking part in the Global Battery Alliance’s 2026 Battery Passport Operational Trials included cell manufacturers representing approximately 80% of global cell production. They worked with suppliers, verifiers, standards organizations and technology providers to test the GBA Battery Passport – an emerging battery certification scheme – end to end, from mapping supply chains and calculating carbon footprints to exchanging data and compiling verified dashboards.

That is an impressive level of global, pre-competitive cooperation across geopolitical divides before we even turn to the data.

Battery value chains are fragmenting, and governments increasingly view critical minerals and battery technologies as strategic assets. Trade tensions, sanctions and counter-sanctions are changing sourcing decisions, while restrictions on cross-border data sharing and geopolitical sensitivities are making data exchange and independent assurance more complex. At the same time, sustainability has been discretely pushed down the corporate and political agenda over the past few years.

Our experience developing and trialling the Battery Passport with our diverse, multistakeholder membership suggests a more complicated and more hopeful picture. Companies will collaborate on sustainability when the work addresses real business and regulatory needs, respects legitimate commercial sensitivities and does not ask global supply chains to organize themselves around a single jurisdiction or technology platform.

The GBA was founded at the World Economic Forum in 2017 as a public-private, multistakeholder partnership with the ambitious goal of making battery value chains sustainable, circular and responsible by 2030.

At the time, much of the task was about establishing a shared vision for a rapidly growing industry. As we approach our 10th anniversary, batteries have become strategic infrastructure for transport, electricity grids, industry and energy security. Whilst it has become increasingly clear that sustainability information should accompany batteries, the question is how to make that information credible and useful across borders, and make it actionable for consumers, procurers and investors.

The Battery Passport is the GBA’s practical answer. It is a global framework for reporting, exchanging, verifying and ultimately certifying sustainability information across a battery’s value chain. It recognizes a diverse set of widely adopted standards – including voluntary sustainability standards – rather than seeking to replace them, and combines them with common rules on issues such as due diligence, greenhouse gas emissions, data exchange and assurance.

That flexibility is important, as regulatory requirements are developing at different speeds and in different directions. A company may need to respond to an EU obligation, a customer request in another market and its own global sustainability commitments. A framework that recognizes existing evidence and can map it to specific requirements is more useful than another stand-alone reporting system.

The trials showed what flexibility and interoperability look like in practice. Forty organizations participated in the trials and six consortia traced their value chains to mine level. In several cases, sensitive source evidence stayed with the facility or local verifier while verified or aggregated results moved downstream. It was not seamless, and not every consortium completed every step. But it demonstrated that trust could travel even when every underlying document cannot.

A key lesson was that regulatory uncertainty need not mean paralysis. Detailed rules for battery due diligence, carbon footprints and digital passports are still evolving. Companies nevertheless used the trials to build supplier relationships, improve primary data and understand where their systems fall short.

Uncertainty around carbon footprint reporting and disclosure methodologies and rules provided the most tangible challenges. Why publish a figure today if a mandatory methodology could produce a different number tomorrow or future thresholds could introduce retrospective liabilities?

These concerns are understandable but waiting for perfect certainty would postpone the collection and sharing of data that credible climate action depends on.

For the GBA this means that we need a sensible route for early movers by being explicit about the methodology and data quality used, distinguishing verified information from estimates, and updating guidance as rules and evidence improve. Early disclosure should be treated as part of the journey towards better performance, not used to punish companies for acting before every detail is settled.

A comparable methodology for supplier environmental, social and governance performance, including performance scoring, can turn mandatory due diligence and supplier engagement into something more valuable than box ticking. The trials showed that standardized information exchange across the value chain can improve efficiency, verification and trust, while creating market value beyond compliance.

These lessons and practical questions on how to provide better support to actors through the value chain, including clearer incentives to participate, are no longer abstract design questions. They define the last push towards launching the final GBA Battery Passport certification scheme early next year.

From my perspective, the operational trials demonstrate that since our founding as a coalition of the willing, the GBA has matured to become an “alliance of the doing”. Our value lies not only in bringing different interests around the same table, but in asking them to build and test something together. The operational trials are the clearest expression of that approach so far.

As we prepare to launch and make the scheme widely available in early 2027, we need to broaden our community of supporters beyond our 160 members. Buyers and investors need to help create demand for verified ESG performance; technology providers need to support common specifications while competing on solutions; and verifiers must play an essential part in ensuring the data that travels through the battery passport can be trusted. Efforts to diversify battery value chains regionally and domestically need not come at the expense of global cooperation. Regulators can support both by recognizing credible, interoperable frameworks such as the GBA Battery Passport, which provides a common foundation adaptable to different regional requirements. Civil society, workers, communities and producing countries must continue to challenge whether our scheme is asking the right questions and whether better data is producing better outcomes.

The trials and the sample verified results, which are available on the GBA website, provide grounds for optimism. At a time when retreat and fragmentation can appear inevitable, 18 consortia chose to cooperate across borders and put a common framework to the test. That does not solve every problem but it does show that cooperation remains possible and worth the effort.