Earlier this year, a little-noticed institutional complaint was filed against the University of Denver’s Sturm College of Law. It did not challenge a specific policy position or legal argument. Instead, it raised a more fundamental question: when institutions claim their work “benefits animals” or advances “liberation,” what baseline are they using to measure that impact—and what, exactly, are they disclosing to the public?
At first glance, this may seem like a technical issue. But it points to a broader problem across animal advocacy, environmental policy, and corporate sustainability. In each of these domains, institutions regularly report progress. They point to laws passed, lawsuits won, partnerships secured, and programs expanded. Yet in many cases, the underlying harms they aim to address (industrial animal production, greenhouse gas emissions, biodiversity loss) continue to grow.
If both of these things are true at the same time, then the question raised in the Denver filing becomes difficult to ignore: progress relative to what? This is what might be called the “baseline problem.” Progress is often measured against a narrow or internal reference point—such as a prior year, a specific program, or a defined intervention—rather than against total, system-level outcomes.
Over the past several decades, animal advocacy has undergone a remarkable transformation. What began in the 1970s as a largely grassroots movement grounded in moral persuasion has evolved into a highly professionalized sector, with sophisticated legal strategies, measurable outcomes, and significant institutional funding. By the early 2000s, the movement had entered a phase of institutionalization, increasingly oriented around metrics, scalability, and partnerships with corporations and policymakers.
By many conventional measures, this trajectory represents success. The movement is larger, more visible, and more influential than ever before.
And yet, during the same period, the scale of harm has expanded dramatically. In the United States alone, roughly 9 to 10 billion land animals are slaughtered each year, the overwhelming majority raised in industrial systems. Even modest increases in population and demand translate into hundreds of millions of additional animals annually. Globally, similar patterns hold. Emissions have reached near record highs, habitat loss continues unabated, and biodiversity decline persists despite decades of advocacy and reform.
This is not to suggest that advocacy efforts have failed. Many have achieved real, measurable improvements. The issue is how those gains are evaluated—typically within a local or programmatic baseline rather than against total system outcomes.
The same dynamic can be seen in corporate sustainability. Companies such as the Coca-Cola Company speak in expansive terms about creating a “better shared future” and protecting the planet. These claims suggest a broad societal impact. But the metrics used to support them are usually far narrower, tied to internal targets such as packaging recovery, recycled content, or emissions reductions relative to a chosen baseline year. The result is a disconnect between the scale of the claims and the scope of the measurement.
These efforts can and often do produce genuine efficiencies. But they are measured within defined accounting boundaries. They don’t necessarily capture system-level effects such as total plastic production, cumulative environmental harm, or long-term public health impacts. The result is a disconnect between the scale of the claims and the scope of the measurement; a gap that becomes especially significant when overall production continues to rise.
Without a clearly defined and disclosed baseline, impact claims become difficult to interpret. A reduction relative to one starting point may still coincide with an increase in total harm. A program can succeed on its own terms while the system it operates within continues to expand.
But success, once institutionalized, carries its own logic. As movements accumulate funding, legitimacy, and influence, the need to uphold a narrative of progress becomes critical to their ongoing existence. In public-interest domains, where harms unfold diffusely and rarely register as immediate failure, there are few external constraints on how impact is framed. Under those conditions, a subtle moral hazard emerges in which progress can be continuously demonstrated within defined boundaries, even as the underlying system it describes continues to expand.
Some observers have begun to describe this dynamic as a form of “illegal baselining.” The term does not suggest that any single claim is necessarily false. Rather, it points to a structural omission in which key assumptions—such as starting conditions, growth dynamics, and system boundaries—are left unstated. The resulting account can become materially misleading, even if each metric is technically accurate.
The Denver complaint brings this ambiguity into focus by asking whether institutions have an obligation to clarify the assumptions underlying their claims. If a program claims to improve conditions for animals, does it also need to disclose whether that claim reflects net outcomes after accounting for factors such as population growth and rising demand? And if those variables are not modeled, should that limitation be made explicit?
These questions extend beyond any single institution. They go to the heart of how public-interest work is evaluated and communicated.
As Zahara Nabakooza, a leader of Truth Alliance Global, has argued, “If equity is to mean anything in practice, then measurement systems must be subjected to the same level of scrutiny as the policies they are designed to evaluate.” That scrutiny includes confronting the possibility that some reported gains are partial, that some harms remain unmeasured, and that some successes may be overstated when viewed at the system level.
This is particularly important in contexts shaped by growth dynamics. Over the past several years, the global population has increased by hundreds of millions, contributing to sustained pressure on emissions, food systems, and ecosystems, as well as on consumption and energy systems. In the United States, population growth of just over 10 million people since 2019 has corresponded to a measurable increase in total animal production, driven largely by poultry. At the same time, the top 10 percent of the global population continues to account for nearly half of all emissions, underscoring how demand and inequality interact in shaping outcomes.
When these dynamics are taken into account, the meaning of “impact” becomes more complex. Efficiency gains and reforms may reduce harm per unit, but if total scale increases, aggregate harm can still rise. Without incorporating those baseline conditions into measurement, it becomes difficult to determine whether progress is actually reducing harm or merely slowing its rate of increase.
This is why the concept of baseline disclosure matters. It is not a technical detail but a question of governance. Institutions that shape public understanding, be it corporations, nonprofits, universities, or policy bodies, must play a central role in defining what counts as success. If those definitions are incomplete or opaque, the resulting narratives can diverge significantly from underlying realities.
The goal is not to dismiss incremental progress or to demand perfect measurement in complex systems. It’s to ensure that claims of impact are anchored in clearly articulated assumptions. At a minimum, this would mean specifying the baseline against which progress is measured, distinguishing between local improvements and system-level outcomes, and acknowledging where key variables like growth and demand are not fully accounted for.
Without that clarity, the gap between reported progress and real-world outcomes is likely to persist. Institutions will continue to celebrate success, even as the problems they seek to address expand.
The complaint against the University of Denver may ultimately be resolved internally. But the question it raises is far broader. In an era defined by interconnected global challenges, the credibility of public-interest work must account for how achievements are measured and communicated.
Because if harm is still increasing, the most important question is not whether progress has been made—but whether we are measuring it against the right baseline.
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