We understand that disclosing through CDP, whether for the first time or as an experienced responder, takes time and requires support. CDP offers this support on every step of the disclosing journey through guidance documentation, live webinars and workshops.
CDP’s guidance documents provide an overview of question pathways as well as details on what information to provide. Once you have registered and activated your questionnaire we can guide you on the format required and where to find tools or further information to construct your answers.
Why should I participate?
There are many benefits to disclosing. To discover more, please visit our page on the benefits of disclosing as a company or as a city.
How do I participate and use the online questionnaire?
We will email the relevant links to you, when participation is requested, at the start of the disclosure period. You need to register using the appropriate link in your invitation email. If you already have an account for our website, you can use the link to sign in using your existing password.
If you have not received an invitation and link, you will not be able to access and edit a questionnaire online (via the dashboard), although you can create a user account for searching public responses online.
If you would like an activation link to register your company to respond, please email [email protected]. If you would like to register your city, please email [email protected].
Once you are signed in, your dashboard will indicate the programs in which you have been asked to participate. You can activate questionnaires using the relevant button on that page. For further information on activation, using the Online Response System (ORS), and submitting a questionnaire, please view our guide to Using the Online Response System (ORS).
I have not been requested to participate. Can I disclose through CDP?
Yes, we welcome new companies to participate in CDP’s climate change, forests and water programs. Please complete this Self-Selected Company (SSC) registration form and send it to [email protected]
To participate in CDP’s supply chain program, a company must be requested to disclose by one of CDP's Supply Chain Members (one of the company’s customers or clients). You can choose to disclose the same information through CDP’s climate change, forests and water programs however.
If you are a city please contact [email protected] for assistance in disclosing to CDP.
My parent organisation already responds, should my subsidiary organisation respond too?
The extent to which the subsidiary should be included in the parent’s response depends on the parent’s organizational boundary, defined by the approach chosen to consolidate emissions-equity share, financial control or operational control. The GHG Protocol gives an explanation of the concept of boundaries and offers extensive guidance on the first three approaches to this situation.
Please note that the approach used, and identified in answer to question CC8.1 of the climate change questionnaire, should be used consistently to respond to all questions in the CDP information request.
For the water questionnaire, please refer to the guidance for questions W0.3 and W0.4.
With regards to the forests questionnaire, if the company is reporting only on a subsidiary rather than the whole company, this should be identified in questions F0.3 and F0.4, and then clarified in question F0.3a and F0.4a.
Please let us know if the information for your organisation is or will be covered by your parent company’s response.
What support is provided to help me disclose?
Core guidance documents can be found on the guidance for cities and guidance for companies pages of the website. We also provide live webinars, workshops and articles designed to aid you with environmental reporting.
A comprehensive suite of guidance documents, webinars and resources for responding can be found on your dashboard. For example, a number of recorded webinars on topics such as:
Will I be penalized for declining to answer all or part of the questionnaire?
Organisations are encouraged to provide as much information as possible. Partial information is more useful than none at all; to you for building upon year on year and for setting goals, and to stakeholders such as CDP Signatory Investors and Supply Chain Members.
If your response is being scored you will lose points where no answer is given. Where you answer "no" to a question, or cannot provide the data requested, in order to maximise the credit for your response you should explain the reasoning you went through to arrive at that conclusion, including if you are working to provide more data in future years.
For more on scoring, please refer to the scoring methodologies for your questionnaire(s).
Can I add another user, e.g. a consultant, to my account?
For each questionnaire there is a ‘Main User’ who has editing and submission permissions. Extra ‘Other Users’ can be added to edit the questionnaire. The Main User for a questionnaire must always be a representative of that organisation, they cannot be a consultant. However, there are two options to give a consultant access to your current questionnaire(s):
What are the differences between a public and a non-public response?
On submission you may choose to make your questionnaire(s) public or non-public. There are differences in the full implications of this choice across programs, and depending on whether you were requested to disclose or if you participated as a Self-selected Company (SSC).
On a basic level:
Detailed information on public and non-public choices for each program can be found in the Terms & Conditions on your ORS Homepage (in the Online Response System (ORS)), and in the Important Information sections of the information requests (pdfs of the questionnaires). These are available on the guidance for cities and guidance for companies pages.
Important differences between investor and customer requests:
What is the timeline for responding?
The 2017 cities questionnaire is available to view on our website from the end of October. Our Online Response System (ORS), for completion and submission of the cities questionnaire, will be available in early 2017.
You can view the 2017 company questionnaires on our website from December. Our ORS, for completion and submission of the company questionnaires, will be available from February for the CDP’s climate change, forests and water programs and April for CDP’s supply chain program.
The deadline that applies depends on the program(s) you are participating in:
We may offer limited extensions in line with standard CDP practice.
Will I receive a score for my questionnaire(s)?
Cities
Cities receive feedback on their response through a Completion and Thoroughness Indicator. This feedback can only be viewed by the city and can be seen on the city dashboard and City Snapshot Report. For more information about your city's feedback please contact [email protected].
Companies
Scoring is closely aligned with CDP’s mission – CDP works with market forces to motivate companies to disclose their impacts on the environment and natural resources and take action to reduce negative impacts.
Each of CDP’s company questionnaires (Climate change, Water and Forests) has an individual scoring methodology; the Climate change and Water methodologies apply to CDP’s supply chain program too. CDP is committed to transparency and as such provides the full scoring methodology for every program online, alongside webinars and explanations.
Before completing one of the company questionnaires, we strongly encourage you to read the Scoring Introduction document, the CDP scoring methodology and the CDP guidance documents for the programs you will respond to. Please note that questions in the sector modules (Electrical, Automotive, FBT, ICT, Oil & Gas) for CDP’s climate change program and the supply chain modules (SM1-4 and SWM1-3) in CDP’s supply chain program are currently not scored.
Eligibility for scoring depends on submission by the official deadline for your questionnaire(s) and on which programs you have been requested to respond to.
Companies that were formally requested and responded in the previous year, but are not formally requested for the current year, will be scored for free providing they respond by the official deadline. Please note that this is only valid for one year. If a company is not formally requested the year after, they will have to pay for On-Demand Scoring if they wish to receive a score again.
The Main Users (person that submitted the questionnaire) for companies eligible for scoring will receive a personalised score feedback email. Feedback calls and charts are also available for companies, with varying availability and potential fees. Your score feedback email will provide further information on this.
Will submitted questionnaires be available to view online?
Organisations that chose to submit their questionnaire as non-public, and non-responders to CDP’s climate change, forests and water programs, will be identified on the website (although non-public responses will not be viewable).
Public responses to CDP’s programs will be published on the website at different times depending on the program:
Detailed information on public and non-public choices for each program, and how this affects your visibility on the CDP website, can be found in the Terms & Conditions on your ORS Homepage, and in the Important Information sections of the information requests (available in PDF format). These are available on the guidance for cities and guidance for companies pages.
How do I change or update a submitted questionnaire?
After submission, your questionnaire is ‘view-only' via your response dashboard so any amendments can only be made by CDP staff.
Submissions and amendment requests must be made by the official deadline (for that program) to be included in the annual CDP reports and scoring. After this date, CDP cannot guarantee that changes made will be reflected in the reports produced.
An amendment fee may be charged for amending your questionnaire after submission. Please see the relevant CDP Amendment Policy, and the amendment forms, for more on the fees and process.
To request an amendment please complete the appropriate amendment form and send it to the indicated email address:
Is there a fee for responding?
Cities
There is no fee to respond if you are a city, state or region disclosing to our questionnaire.
Companies
There is an administrative fee of US$975 (excl. any applicable taxes) for companies responding to one or more of our investor requests on climate change, water or forests. The fee applies to companies listed, incorporated or headquartered in Argentina, Australia, Austria, Bahamas, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Cayman Islands, Channel Islands, Chile, Colombia, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Iceland, India, Indonesia, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Malaysia, Mexico, Netherlands, Norway, Peru, Philippines, Portugal, Singapore, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, Thailand, the UK or the USA.
We will introduce the administrative fee in additional countries in the future as reporting becomes standard business practice in them.
Your company will be exempt from the fee if (1) it falls within one of CDP’s investor samples and it has not submitted a response to CDP in the last three years, or (2) it is responding only to our supply chain request. All Self-selected Companies (i.e. those that have not been requested to respond to an investor request but have chosen to do so independently, irrespective of any supply chain requests) from the countries listed above are required to pay the administrative fee whether or not they have responded previously.
You can check if the fee applies to your company when you log in to the CDP dashboard to disclose. If it does apply you will automatically be prompted to pay the fee by credit card or to request an invoice when submitting your response(s) through our online disclosure platform.
CDP is a not-for-profit organization and to deliver our services at the necessary global scale we now require a small contribution towards our costs from both companies and investors participating in our system. Find out more about the fee.