CDP Full Corporate Questionnaire

Addressing the climate crisis cannot be achieved without simultaneously addressing the nature crisis. Carbon emissions and climate change are only part of the challenge. At least US$44 trillion in economic value is generated through the exploitation of natural resources every year while losses to nature continue at unprecedented rates.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) agree that climate and nature must be addressed simultaneously and in an equitable way. This includes conserving, protecting, and restoring ecosystems, adopting more sustainable agricultural and forestry practices, and pursuing a circular economy. In this context, it is more important than ever to accelerate corporate action on deforestation and water security, and to act on the full range of environmental issues. CDP’s move to an integrated questionnaire will enable our stakeholders to better assess all environmental impacts in their direct operational activity, value chain, and financial decisions. We are also integrating new data points to encourage companies to address the interconnectivity of these issues.

With the multi-environmental issue questionnaire, disclosers will experience an improved interface and a more intuitive workflow. The questionnaire will encourage a shift towards holistic environmental management and prepare disclosers to better respond to market and regulator demands.

A multi-environmental issue questionnaire also enables us to meet our strategic goals of expanding across environmental issues like biodiversity, plastics, and land more systematically and without replicating governance and strategy questions. We started expanding to a wider coverage of environmental issues with the introduction of biodiversity in 2022, and plastics in 2023. In the future, stakeholders should expect to see an expanded coverage of environmental issues.

There will still be questions and scores specific to environmental issues in the full corporate questionnaire, but disclosers will be challenged with a more holistic approach. Disclosers will see questions on all the environmental issues that they have been requested to report on, in one unified interface, and will only need to submit one response.

The entire response will need to be either ‘public’ or ‘non-public’, except for content specific to Supply Chain Member requests which remains private.

No. In 2024, disclosers will continue to be scored separately on climate change, forests, and water security. Please note that plastics and biodiversity questions will not be scored in 2024.

• All organizations will be asked to respond to climate change questions;
• All organizations responding to the full corporate questionnaire will be asked supplementary questions on plastics and biodiversity;
• Organizations will only be asked to respond to forests and water datapoints if at least one of the following conditions is met for forests and/or water security respectively:
  1. Asked by a requester i.e., capital markets request, supply chain request, banks request etc.
  2. Based on industry impact classification i.e., the environmental impact of your CDP-ACS activities on forests and/or water, as established by the CDP industry impact classification. This is not applicable to organizations responding to the SME questionnaire.
  3. Self-assessment i.e., based on whether you have indicated that you have identified substantive forests- and/or water-related issues in your questionnaire setup. This is not applicable to organizations responding to the SME questionnaire.
  4. Opt-in i.e. if none of the above conditions are met but your organization chooses to disclose on forests and/or water security.

Note: Organizations that have received the CDP Letter to the Board can review their initial assessment of environmental issues they are requested to disclose to in the How Companies are Selected webpage; however, this initial environmental issue assignment is subject to change. Further details on thresholds determining whether an organization is requested to respond to forests and/or water security questions can be found in the Industry Impact Classification methodology.

Additionally, your Supply Chain, Bank or Private Market requesters may specifically request your organization to respond to an environmental issue. Organizations are welcome to volunteer to disclose on environmental issues, whether or not they have been requested to do so.

CDP's full corporate questionnaire includes additional datapoints for organizations in high-impact sectors relating to climate change, forests, water security, plastics, and biodiversity. Organizations in high-impact sectors will be presented with questions specific to that sector in addition to the general questions.

The sector-specific questions allocated to organizations are defined by CDP's Activity Classification System (CDP-ACS). This system categorizes organizations by focusing on the activities from which they derive revenue and associating these with potential effects on their organization regarding climate change, deforestation, and water security. 

An organization may be allocated up to four questionnaire sectors (including ‘General’). However, if an organization is eligible for CDP scoring, they will only be scored on their primary questionnaire sector.

For more information, please refer to the CDP Activity Classification System.

Note: the CDP SME corporate questionnaire does not include sector-specific questions. For information on CDP's dedicated questionnaire for Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs), refer to the CDP SME corporate questionnaire webpage.

The focus on risks and opportunities will be shifted to include the assessment of environmental impacts and dependencies.

In 2024, disclosers should demonstrate visibility and knowledge of the entities they have control over, as well as across their value chain. Additionally, under TNFD guidance, responding organizations should identify priority locations for forests, water, and biodiversity.

For more information on changes, please visit our disclosure hub, or refer to the 2024 CDP Question-level changes and 2023-2024 map.

Historically, some questions were repeated across all three corporate CDP questionnaires – for example, questions on governance. Where possible, we are now combining these questions to offer a better user experience for disclosers and to encourage companies to think holistically about environmental management.

Combining all three questionnaires will change the format of the questionnaire. However, in 2024, the information we are requesting from companies and the actions we’re seeking to drive will not fundamentally change. CDP will still ask for theme or environmental issue-specific datapoints within this integrated dataset. Questions that are only relevant to one environmental issue will be kept separate. Supply Chain questions – presented to Supply Chain requested organizations – have also been spread throughout the questionnaire and are no longer in a standalone module.

Companies can expect to see multi-environmental issue questions in all modules, with the exception of ‘Environmental Performance’ which will include distinct sections and questions for each of the themes or environmental issues they are reporting on. This applies to all sectors other than financial services.

For all other modules, the degree of multi-environmental issues within single questions will differ. In many integrated questions, we will still ask for issue-specific datapoints to provide granularity and continuity. Integrated questions will be structured in a number of different ways.

Update: You can now access the CDP full corporate questionnaire.