The What hierarchy — 415-node classification tree

The 415-node thematic hierarchy that organizes everything FAND measures.

The “What” hierarchy

Where the spatial scales answer where a number sits, the What hierarchy answers what it is. Every value FAND produces is keyed to a “What code” — a position in a classification tree of 415 nodes (290 leaves, 125 branches, max depth 11), organizing roughly 3,000 development indicators drawn from about ten source databases.

It is the thematic navigation axis: a reader looking at a country’s balance sheet clicks Natural Capital and sees it break into fossil fuels, minerals, fisheries, farmland, forests; clicks Fossil Fuels and sees oil, gas, coal. The same tree classifies every component, at every spatial scale.

The top levels

1   Total Assets
├── 1.1   Assets
│   ├── 1.1.1   Claim-Rights — collateralizable
│   │   ├── 1.1.1.2   PA — Produced Assets
│   │   ├── 1.1.1.3   NC — Natural Capital
│   │   │   ├── Fossil Fuels (oil, gas, coal)
│   │   │   ├── Minerals (individual commodities — gold, copper, iron ore, …)
│   │   │   ├── Fisheries
│   │   │   ├── Agricultural Land (cropland, pastureland)
│   │   │   ├── Forest Timber
│   │   │   └── Forest Cover
│   │   └── 1.1.1.4   Cross-Border Claim-Rights (gross foreign assets)
│   └── 1.1.2   Substantive Rights — non-collateralizable
│       ├── 1.1.2.1   HR — Human Resources (education + health)
│       └── 1.1.2.2   SR — Other Substantive Rights
│           ├── 'free' services of nature (mangroves, hydropower, carbon, water, solar, wind)
│           └── 'free' trust infrastructure (institutions, rule of law, social cohesion)
└── 1.2   Liabilities  (to whom?)
    ├── 1.2.2   Deferred Maintenance of trust infrastructure (DM)
    ├── 1.2.3   Cross-Border Duties (gross foreign liabilities)
    └── 1.2.4   Net Worth — the liability to the owners of the place

This is the top of the tree; the full 415-node version runs down to individual commodities and ecosystem-service flows (max depth 11). The machine-readable contract that maps each code to its data source is what_code_manifest.json.

Two classification rules worth knowing

• Natural Capital is not “all nature-related wealth.” Mangroves, hydropower, carbon, and the other “free services of nature” are Substantive Rights (no legally enforceable duty backs them), so they classify under SR (1.1.2.2), not under NC (1.1.1.3). NC is the depletable, severable, collateralizable subsoil-and-land stock.
• Substantive Rights sit inside Commonwealth, not above it. SR decomposes the SI residual within CW; the ecosystem-service leaves file claims on SR’s collective value rather than adding a separate top-line.

These distinctions are codified in the nc_aggregation flag inside the manifest, so the same tree can answer both “what is Natural Capital?” and “what is the full balance sheet?” without double-counting.

How it powers the site

Every balance-sheet figure on this site is tagged with its What code, which is what makes the thematic drill-down work: expand a parent to see its children, each carrying its own value, source, and NUSAP data-quality pedigree. The interactive 415-node explorer is in progress; this page shows the top levels in the meantime.