CDP evolves annually to push corporate ambition further, and to support companies and financial markets to transition in line with a 1.5°C, nature-positive world.
In 2024, CDP will roll out a new multi-environmental issue format for the CDP full corporate questionnaire, combining all three existing questionnaires across climate, forests, and water security into one questionnaire. Learn more in our FAQ below.
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 water security and deforestation, 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, supply chain, and financial decisions. We are also integrating new data points to encourage companies to address interconnectivity of these issues.
With 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.
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.
There will still be theme specific questions and scores in the full corporate questionnaire, but disclosers will be challenged with a more holistic approach. They will see questions on all the themes or 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, water security, and forests. Please note that plastics and biodiversity questions in 2024 will not be scored.
Historically, some questions were repeated across all three 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 theme-specific datapoints to provide granularity and continuity. Integrated questions will be structured in a number of different ways.
The new multi-environmental issue questionnaire does not mean that all companies will have to answer datapoints on all themes or multi-environmental issues. All disclosers responding to the full corporate questionnaire will continue to be assigned climate change datapoints in 2024, and will also be asked questions on Plastics and Biodiversity.
Questions on water and forests will continue to be presented to companies based on how relevant these issues are to their business and activities. The relevance of these questions will be assessed using the CDP Activity Classification System (ACS) methodology, following the same process CDP has used to determine requests to large public companies for the last decade.
The approach for investor-requested disclosers will be the same in 2024 as in previous years and we will release the methodology for assessing whether a sector will receive water and forest questions in early 2024 – note, there will only be minor changes from the 2023 methodology. For assignment of the water theme, we will use our Water Watch tool; for forests, we will use the sector methodology outlined in Appendix 1 of our CDP Forests Sample – Investor Request 2023 document.
Disclosers that have been requested to respond to forests and water security in the past will most likely be presented with these themes or environmental issues again as part of the integrated questionnaire. You can find out which theme(s) a given investor-requested company was asked to respond to in 2023.
The more significant change in 2024 is that this methodology will be applied to all companies, so will also be used to determine which themes or environmental issues those requested only by their customer(s) will be assigned.
For example, whereas Supply Chain members have previously identified which theme(s) or environmental issue(s) their suppliers are asked to disclose on, going forwards this will be determined by CDP, following assessment using the CDP ACS. This also applies to companies asked to disclose by a bank or private market investor. CDP Supply Chain members, banks, and private market investors will still be able to additionally request their stakeholders to disclose on any theme(s) or environmental issue(s) they consider relevant, regardless of CDP’s assessment.
We will be making one further change in 2024. We will allow organizations to indicate whether they have identified any dependencies, impacts, risks or opportunities relating to forests and water. If they select 'yes', they will be presented with the water and forests questions. This will add another layer of verification to ensure our stakeholders are disclosing on and receiving the most relevant information to drive action.
Plastics
In 2023, companies disclosing on water security were also presented with a set of plastics questions. While plastics has a strong impact on water quality, it is also relevant across a wider range of environmental issues. So in 2024, all corporate disclosers – with the exception of SMEs and public authorities – will be presented with some basic data points on plastics. High-impact sectors for plastics impact may be presented with a wider range of questions.
From 2024, the plastics activities identification will expand from production/commercialization to provision of waste and/or water management activities, as well as provision of financial products/services for plastics-related activities. This will allow for future expansion of plastics-related metrics to capture the full value chain of activities.
Biodiversity
Biodiversity questions in previous years have been presented to anyone disclosing on the climate change questionnaire. CDP recognises the connectivity between biodiversity, climate change and all nature-related issues. Therefore all corporate disclosers will be presented basic biodiversity datapoints in 2024, with the exception of SMEs and public authorities.
Neither plastics nor biodiversity questions will be scored in 2024.