Water Quality Benefit Accounting

Overview

Water Quality Benefit Accounting is a guidance document from the World Resources Institute, LimnoTech, and The Nature Conservancy for quantifying the water quality benefits of water stewardship projects. It helps companies and project implementers select activities that address shared water quality challenges and choose indicators and methods to quantify, track, and communicate the resulting improvements. Benefits are expressed through water quality indicators such as reductions in pollutant or nutrient loads, and there is no single standard credit unit. The guidance is voluntary and was first published in September 2025.

Sources: methodology document · World Resources Institute

01 · Roles

The workflow as an explicit directed graph. In Graph each column is one role, so you can see who acts at each step; every node names the org.broadlistening.policy.block.* def it resolves to plus its input and output record. Data flow switches to a lineage view that makes explicit what data each node needs and makes, with dependency arcs tracing every record back to the node that produced it. Hover to trace, click to inspect; revise edges (dashed) send work back.

03 · Generated lexicon records

The records this methodology compiles to, ready to write to a PDS. The first tabs are the new policy engine records; the ★ claim.activity tab and those after it are reused ATProto Collective Funding Ecosystem records (org.hypercerts.*): the issued hypercert batch, its rights, an example verification attachment and a retirement receipt.

{
  "$type": "org.broadlistening.policy.methodology",
  "code": "WQBA",
  "name": "Water Quality Benefit Accounting",
  "registry": "World Resources Institute (WRI)",
  "sector": "Water quality",
  "creditType": "water",
  "status": "active",
  "version": "1.0",
  "scopes": [
    "Water",
    "Water quality"
  ],
  "aligns": [
    "AWS Standard"
  ],
  "roles": [
    {
      "id": "registry",
      "name": "Standard Registry",
      "permission": "Owns the policy, approves participants, anchors each issuance to its evidence."
    },
    {
      "id": "proponent",
      "name": "Project Proponent",
      "permission": "Registers the project and submits monitoring reports."
    },
    {
      "id": "vvb",
      "name": "Validation & Verification Body",
      "permission": "Independently validates the design and verifies monitored data."
    }
  ],
  "schemas": [
    "at://did:plc:bl0adl1sten1ngp0l1cyreg/org.broadlistening.policy.schema/wri-wqba-water-intervention",
    "at://did:plc:bl0adl1sten1ngp0l1cyreg/org.broadlistening.policy.schema/wri-wqba-water-monitoring"
  ],
  "graph": "at://did:plc:bl0adl1sten1ngp0l1cyreg/org.broadlistening.policy.graph/wri-wqba",
  "issuesAs": "org.hypercerts.claim.activity",
  "workScope": "at://did:plc:bl0adl1sten1ngp0l1cyreg/org.hypercerts.workscope.cel/wri-wqba-scope",
  "rights": "at://did:plc:bl0adl1sten1ngp0l1cyreg/org.hypercerts.claim.rights/wri-wqba-rights",
  "createdAt": "2025-01-01T00:00:00.000Z"
}

04 · Schemas

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