About true pricing

Across the world, the call for more sustainable, fair, and resilient systems is growing louder. From climate change and biodiversity loss to inequality and food insecurity, the challenges we face are deeply interconnected and rooted in our system.

More and more, governments, businesses, scientists, and citizens are recognising the need to rethink how we value products and make decisions. True pricing is gaining momentum as a practical and systemic approach to help address these challenges by making the hidden social and environmental costs of products visible and actionable.

True pricing is a method to make these costs visible and actionable. By quantifying them in monetary terms, it enables companies, governments, and consumers to identify where the most harm occurs, and to take targeted steps to reduce it. In this way, true pricing becomes a practical instrument for improving the sustainability of products and supply chains over time.

Importantly, the goal of true pricing is not to make products more expensive, but to make them more sustainable. It is grounded in internationally recognised human rights and environmental standards, and supports the responsibility of producers, retailers, and consumers to respect those rights through informed choices and fairer practices.

With true pricing we stimulate a sustainable global economy in which ‘hidden’ social and environmental costs in the value chain become visible. True pricing can be used by different stakeholders in the production and consumption process.

Consumers – transparency allows consumers to make more sustainable decisions and voluntarily pay the true price.

Businesses – transparency allows for improving sustainable production processes and strategies.

Governments – transparency in local, national and preferably international economies allow for implementing better policies and regulations.

When all stakeholders are incentivized to pay the true price, then infringements on human and natural rights can be restored, compensated and/or prevented. True pricing aims to minimize, and eventually eliminate, social and environmental harm from production and consumption processes so we can produce and consume within the planetary boundaries.