This document explains how Foundational Environmental Performance (FEP) is represented in the Higg Assessment Model — what it measures, how the achievement aggregates are calculated, and what to read into the four FEP fields exposed on the Assessment record.

FEP is a tag overlay on a subset of the Higg FEM Level 1 questions. The questions themselves are existing FEM content; FEP marks the ones that represent the industry-aligned baseline of environmental management practices. Cascale published the definition through the AIDFEP (Aligned Industry Definition of FEP) consultation process in 2024–2025; the result is a curated set of 56 to 58 achievement records per cadence, most of them one reference question ID checked against a small allow-list of answer values, plus two compound records that roll a family of questions up into a single practice. The full stakeholder rationale is published separately by Cascale; this guide covers what’s actually in the bundle.

Purpose of the Calculation

FEP rolls up the assessment’s responses against the curated foundational question set into four summary fields, giving consumers a single view of how a facility scores on the baseline expectations without re-deriving the achievement criteria question-by-question.

The achievement criteria are deliberately narrow:

1. Most foundational questions are pass/fail on "yes". The facility either confirms the practice is in place or it doesn’t.

2. Some questions accept partial credit on "partialYes". Where a foundational practice can meaningfully exist in a partial form (e.g. wastewater tracking implemented for some streams but not all), "partialYes" is treated as a passing answer alongside "yes".

3. A few questions accept “not applicable”. Where a foundational practice can plausibly not apply to a given facility (e.g. chemical management at a facility with no chemicals on site), "na" is treated as a passing answer — the facility hasn’t failed; the question just doesn’t apply to it.

4. Two practices span several questions. The chemical inventory data items (chemtrackdata<n>) and the permit statuses (sippermitstatus, one per required permit) are each one practice: every item has to be met for the record to be achieved. See “Compound FEPs” under Methodology.

The aggregate fields treat applicability and achievement as distinct: a question that resolves to undefined (the facility’s answer or conditional logic indicates the question doesn’t apply at all) is excluded from both the numerator and denominator of the achievement ratio. This means a facility that’s never asked a particular foundational question doesn’t get penalized for not answering it.

Record Types

The FEP aggregates live on a single record type:

• Assessment: Whole-facility FEP roll-up. Four fields per assessment, described below.

The underlying per-question Fep records are also present in the bundle — they appear as compiled blocks under each cadence’s RFI PID in model.json.gz. Each carries:

• __name__: fep_<refid> (e.g. fep_chemstorage).
• __type__: Fep.
• ref_id: the FEM question’s ref ID (e.g. chemstorage). The two compound records carry the family’s name instead: chemtrackdata and sippermitstatus.
• logic: a JS expression that evaluates to true, false, or undefined once the facility’s answers are supplied.

Consumers that want per-question detail rather than the aggregates read the Fep blocks directly. The aggregates on Assessment are the convenience layer.

The Four Aggregate Fields

All four are number? or bool? and follow a single gating contract: if no Fep in the assessment evaluates to logic === true (either because no Feps are defined for the cadence, none are applicable, or all applicable ones failed), every field is undefined. The achievement story is treated as not meaningful in that state rather than projecting a misleading “0 out of N” mix into the data.

• fep_achieved (bool?): true when every applicable Fep has logic !== false (so achieved or N/A); false if at least one applicable Fep failed; undefined per the gate above.

  Read this as “did the facility meet the foundational baseline?” when you want a single yes/no answer.

• fep_achievement (number?): The ratio of achieved Feps to applicable Feps. Always in [0, 1]. 1.0 means every applicable Fep passed; a fractional value means some applicable Feps failed.

  Read this when ranking or benchmarking — the ratio is the most useful field for comparing facilities to each other or to themselves over time.

• fep_achieved_count (number?): Count of Feps whose logic evaluated to true (achieved). Use alongside fep_unachieved_count to display “X of Y” on a UI.

• fep_unachieved_count (number?): Count of Feps whose logic evaluated to false (applicable, not achieved). Use alongside fep_achieved_count. The two counts plus the count of undefined-logic Feps sum to the total Fep set defined for the cadence.

Methodology

Per-question Logic

Each foundational question’s logic is a JS expression that maps the facility’s answer to the question into one of three states:

• true — achieved. The answer was on the allow-list for this question.
• false — not achieved. The answer was outside the allow-list but the question was answered.
• undefined — not applicable to this facility (the question was never resolved, or the facility’s conditional path skipped it).

The allow-list pattern depends on the question’s option list:

• Yes/No questions: allow-list is ["yes"].
• Yes/PartialYes/No questions: allow-list is ["yes", "partialYes"] — both pass.
• Yes/No/N-A questions: allow-list is ["yes", "na"] — “doesn’t apply” is a pass, since you can’t fail an expectation that doesn’t apply to you.

The undefined-guard wrapper (<ref> !== undefined ? <check> : undefined) is what keeps a hidden conditional question from counting against the facility. This is the canonical Fep pattern; every single-question Fep block follows the same shape.

Which questions carry a record is a Cascale policy decision, not a property of FEM scoring: the set is the FEM questions tagged as Foundational that also score, with a short list of adjustments applied the same way in every cadence (first published in HAM 0.5.0). Three unscored questions count toward achievement — sipvalidoperatinglicense (yes), wwsludgereporting (yes) and wwsludge (yes or partialYes) — and six scored, Foundational-tagged questions do not: wwstandard, watgroundlegalreq, wwsludgestoragepermeability, wwsludgeprecipitation, wwsludgestoredseperate and wwsludgeprotect. Those six remain in the Foundational question set on the platform; they simply carry no achievement record.

Compound FEPs

Two records roll a family of questions up into one practice.

• chemtrackdata — every scored chemical inventory data item (chemtrackdata1, chemtrackdata2, … ; the scored members vary slightly by cadence) must be "yes". Any other answer on any member, including an unanswered member, is false. The items are only shown when the facility tracks its chemical inventory (chemtrack), and a facility that answers chemtrack with "no" has not met this practice either, so the record is false in that case even though the items themselves are hidden. It is undefined only while chemtrack is unanswered and nothing in the family has been reached.

• sippermitstatus — every permit the facility has marked as required must have the status "valid" (“Available and valid”). Permits that are not required have no status and are skipped; any other status on a required permit (“Not available”, “Not available due to authorization in progress”, “Available but Invalid”) makes the record false. It is undefined until at least one permit has a status.

Each compound record counts once in the aggregates, exactly like a single-question record.

Aggregation

The four aggregate fields are computed by walking the cadence’s Fep set in compile context and producing JS expressions that:

• fep_achieved: ANDs logic !== false across every Fep.
• fep_achievement: divides count(logic === true) by count(logic !== undefined).
• fep_achieved_count: sums logic === true ? 1 : 0 across Feps.
• fep_unachieved_count: sums logic === false ? 1 : 0.

Each is gated on OR logic === true across every Fep — if no Fep passed, all four aggregates evaluate to undefined.

Caveats

• No additional scoring penalty. A failed Fep does not subtract from the FEM score on its own. The underlying FEM questions are Level 1 content with the usual scoring weight, so a “no” answer on a foundational question already reduces the FEM score through that path. The FEP aggregates are a reporting overlay, not a separate scoring mechanism.

• Cadence-specific question set. The set of questions tagged as Foundational evolves cadence to cadence. A direct year-over-year comparison of fep_achievement is meaningful only if the question set is unchanged; otherwise the ratio’s denominator has shifted underneath you. The cadence-specific guidance below notes when the set changes.

• Mostly single-question dependencies. Each Fep’s logic operates on one question, except the two compound records described above. Where a foundational expectation involves several otherwise independent FEM questions, each keeps its own Fep record and the relationship is captured implicitly by both Feps appearing in the aggregate.

• No country-specific Feps except sipiperecords. The foundational set is global, with one documented exception: the China-only IPE-database question. Don’t expect to find FEPs keyed to region in the bundle today.

Cadence Coverage

FEP is available for FEM 2023 onwards. Earlier cadences (fem2017–fem2022) have no Fep records and the aggregate fields on Assessment evaluate to undefined for those cadences.

HAM 0.5.0 changed the set in every cadence at once: the three unscored questions and the two compound records were added, and wwstandard and watgroundlegalreq were removed everywhere. fem2026 and fem2027 additionally lost their twelve to thirteen per-item chemtrackdata<n> records (now the one compound record) and the four sludge-storage records listed under “Per-question Logic”, so their counts fell from 71–72 to 58. fep_achievement values from HAM 0.4.0 and earlier are not comparable with 0.5.0 for those two cadences.

FEP Standalone Variant (fem2026 and later)

Starting in fem2026, FEM cadences expose a fep_standalone variant alongside the regular fem variant. The standalone variant serializes only the FEP-tagged questions, so a consumer that wants to render only the foundational baseline can do so without pulling the full FEM module.

For HAM consumers this is transparent — the same Fep blocks appear in the compiled output regardless of which variant generated the assessment. The standalone variant is a platform-side question-set filter, not a separate logic path.

If a facility completes only the FEP standalone assessment, the aggregate fields on its Assessment reflect that subset directly. There is no “is this a standalone assessment?” flag on the record; infer it from the cadence’s variant tagging if you need to.

Cadence Specific Guidance

FEM 2023

The initial FEP set: 56 records. Chemical management, wastewater and sludge controls, waste handling and environmental management dominate the set. fep_standalone is not available for this cadence.

FEM 2024 and FEM 2025

fem2024 is the fem2023 set with chemcmspolicy split into its production and non-production questions (57 records). fem2025 is re-derived from the Foundational question tags: chemfailresolution, chemsubstorage, wstsourcehtrack and wwstormwatermixing join the set and chempurchasereqrsl, emsopsimpact and emsregulationsystem leave it (58 records). fep_standalone is not available for these cadences.

FEM 2026 and FEM 2027

The fem2025 set (58 records). The fep_standalone variant is introduced — see above. As before, the aggregate fields on Assessment reflect whichever subset is present in the evaluated assessment. These two cadences are also where the FEP aggregates are published as calculations on the assessment itself (fep_achieved, fep_achievement, fep_achieved_count, fep_unachieved_count), built from the same record set, so the platform’s figures and the HAM’s agree by construction.