Recently, CDP has released its new corporate disclosure questionnaire. Compared to previous years, this year's questionnaire has undergone significant optimization and integration. In 2024, CDP has consolidated the three original corporate questionnaires (climate change, forests, water security) into a single comprehensive questionnaire, allowing companies requested to respond on multiple environmental issues to complete it in one form and encouraging more comprehensive and balanced disclosure across different environmental issues.
The latest CDP corporate questionnaire closely follows the latest findings in environmental natural science research and aligns with new high-quality disclosure frameworks and standards, ensuring the authority and cutting-edge nature of the questionnaire content. Additionally, the new questionnaire adds new data points on the basis of the original climate change, forest, and water security questionnaires, providing a more comprehensive reflection of companies' performance and progress on these key environmental issues.
This article will interpret the key questions in the latest CDP corporate questionnaire to help companies better understand and adapt to these changes, promoting continuous progress in environmental information disclosure work.
01 Corporate Disclosure Timeline
CDP has updated the user login system since the end of last year. The publication of the 2023 rating results was delayed compared to previous years, being announced in February 2024. For the 2024 fiscal year, a new integrated questionnaire will be used for companies to report their environmental information. This series of updates has changed all key time points within the 2024 CDP questionnaire disclosure cycle.
Starting from May 14, 2024, disclosing companies need to pay attention to the invitation letters sent by investors and customers for reporting. On June 4th, the submission portal opens, and companies can begin filling out the questionnaire content. Before this time, companies should prepare materials, information, and data required for the questionnaire, such as completing Scope 1, 2, and 3 carbon inventories, identifying environmental risks and opportunities, setting corporate carbon targets and water targets, etc. Companies that submit their questionnaires before September 18th can obtain the questionnaire ratings for this year. Questionnaires submitted later than this time will not receive ratings. The company submission window will close on October 2nd, ending this year's submission period.
02 Integrating Original Climate Change, Forests, Water Security Questionnaires into a Single Comprehensive Questionnaire
CDP will replace the three separate questionnaires focusing on climate change, forests, and water security with a single integrated questionnaire. Disclosing companies will see and fill out all invited environmental topics in a unified interface, submitting only one questionnaire response. This enables companies and stakeholders to better evaluate all related environmental impacts in their operations, supply chains, and financial decisions. Through structural optimization adjustments, the new questionnaire will provide disclosing companies with an optimized interface and a more intuitive workflow, asking the right questions to the right organizations in the right way to avoid repetition. Supply chain-related questions will be distributed throughout the questionnaire modules and will no longer appear as a separate module.
03 Full Version Questionnaire Still Rated Separately for Climate Change, Forests, Water Security
The integrated questionnaire does not mean that all companies must disclose all themes or environmental issues data points. All companies responding to the full version questionnaire will continue to be allocated climate change data points and will be asked about plastic and biodiversity issues. In 2024, companies will continue to receive separate ratings for climate change, water security, and forests. The biodiversity issue added in 2022 and the plastic issue added in 2023 are also integrated into the new questionnaire as separate environmental topic modules, but they are not rated.
04 SMEs Questionnaire Replacing Original Simplified Version
CDP is launching a dedicated survey questionnaire for Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs) in 2024. This questionnaire will replace the original Minimum simplified version questionnaire and the pilot private market SME questionnaire. This makes it easier for SMEs to understand where they should focus, build capacity, and take action. The SME questionnaire data points are largely consistent with the full questionnaire, but have fewer data points, simplified question formats, strengthened basic principles and question guidance to emphasize why the data points in the questionnaire are particularly important for SME disclosure. The SME questionnaire focuses on climate change issues and includes several targeted water security and forest data points to ensure continuity of key data not covered by climate topics in past surveys. The SME questionnaire is rated only for climate change.
05 Strengthening Alignment with Market and Regulatory Disclosure Standards
By aligning with the most widely used frameworks and standards globally and integrating them into a single questionnaire, CDP supports companies in taking action in the rapidly evolving field of environmental disclosure. The questionnaire translates standards into questions and data points that need to be answered and acted upon, sharing high-quality data through a single dataset with stakeholders and the market.
Aligning with the global benchmark for climate-related financial disclosures provided through ISSB standards, CDP supports companies and reduces their disclosure burden, ensuring that investors and regulators can access the required data across regions and meet different regulatory requirements. Building on alignment with TCFD recommendations, the integrated questionnaire for 2024 will align with ISSB’s climate-related disclosure standard (IFRS S2) and reflect the TNFD framework, encouraging more companies to disclose information related to both climate and nature issues simultaneously.
At the same time, CDP’s disclosure framework partially aligns with the SEC’s climate disclosure rules and the European Sustainability Reporting Standards (ESRS), demonstrating its broad international recognition and applicability, providing companies with a more comprehensive and flexible tool for environmental information disclosure.
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