CDP Questionnaire: Master the Response Process & Keep an Eye on Updates

CDP assesses a company's sustainability performance using a comprehensive questionnaire. In 2024, the focus of the CDP assessment was expanded to include not only risks and opportunities but also environmental impacts and dependencies. Understanding environmental impacts for both companies and the supply chains in which they operate is therefore becoming increasingly important.

Through the integrated CDP questionnaire, companies publish essential information and data on climate change, forests, water security, plastics, and biodiversity.

In this blog article, you can find out more about the basics of the CDP questionnaire and what's new in 2024. We also show you how you can optimize your reporting practices using ESG software and thus increase your efficiency.

CDP Questionnaire: Structure and Content

Companies carry out the CDP-Rating by answering a questionnaire via CDP's Online Reporting System (ORS).

If a company is asked to complete the CDP questionnaire at the customer's request or decides to do so voluntarily, it can download the questionnaire as a PDF from the CDP website before the portal officially opens. These documents are often over 100 pages long. This marks the start of the CDP preparation process, which is usually the most time-consuming for the company.

Since April 2024, CDP has been offering a new integrated questionnaire format, which comprises the previous three questionnaires on the following topics:

• Climate change
• Forests
• Water security

The integrated company questionnaire helps stakeholders to better understand environmental impacts in areas of climate change, forests, water security, plastics and biodiversity – in context of business activities, value chain and financial decisions.

Not every company is required to disclose data on all environmental topics or answer all questions when completing the integrated questionnaire. However, all companies are assessed against climate change indicators, while questions on forests and water security are tailored to the specific relevance and operations of each company.

In general, the length of the questionnaire may vary depending on the response to specific questions. For example, there could be a series of follow-up questions after a previous question has been answered with "yes". Many of the questions are questions about quantitative data. The further companies progress on their path to sustainability, the longer and more comprehensive their questionnaire is likely to become.

Structure of the Integrated CDP Questionnaire (as of 2024)

The 2024 CDP questionnaire comprises 13 modules. Modules 1 to 6 as well as 12 and 13 are integrated: questions in these modules cover more than one disclosure topic. In contrast, modules 7 to 11 focus on environmental performance, while each module is dedicated to a specific disclosure topic. Companies in the financial services sector receive Module 12, an integrated, sector-specific environmental performance assessment module.

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All companies receive questions on climate change data points, as well as supplementary questions on plastics and biodiversity. Data points on forests and water security are only requested if the company has either applied for these topics or voluntarily decides to report on them. The complete CDP company questionnaire is completed in the following steps:

• Module 1-6, 13 (integrated modules): Cover several environmental areas
• Module 7-11 (environmental performance): Specific environmental topics
• Module 12 (for the financial sector): Sector-specific environmental performance data

For small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), there is a simplified version of the questionnaire that includes fewer data points.

Further details on the individual modules of CDP: Modules 1-6, 7, and 8-13

Criteria for selection of Data Points for the CDP Questionnaire

The full CDP questionnaire requires companies to take comprehensive and effective action on a wide range of environmental issues in order to integrate climate and nature protection into their corporate strategy. CDP recommends following the principles for truthful and fair reporting based on the Greenhouse Gas Protocol:

1. Relevance: Ensure that emissions and water consumption reflect actual environmental impacts and support decision-making by internal and external users.
2. Completeness: Report all relevant sources of emissions, water activities and potential forests risks.
3. Consistency: Use consistent methodologies to enable comparisons over time.
4. Transparency: Report clearly and comprehensibly, taking into account all relevant assumptions, sources, and changes.
5. Accuracy: Provide accurate data to ensure informed decision-making.

CDP Questionnaire: Changes in 2024

CDP adapts the questionnaire every year to drive business ambition and support companies and financial markets in the transformation to a 1.5 °C deforestation-free and water-secure world.

When reporting, companies must pay particular attention to high-quality, transparent and verified data in order to meet the increasing requirements in the area of sustainability and therefore also the CDP questionnaire. In 2024, CDP has made the following adjustments:

‍1. Integrated questionnaire (climate change, water security, forests)

In 2024, the CDP questionnaire was adapted so that all relevant topics, including climate-related and nature-related aspects, are now covered in a single, holistic questionnaire. The deadline for data submission has been postponed to October in 2024 to give companies more time to prepare and verify data in the online platform.

2. New SME questionnaire for small and medium-sized enterprises

A specialized questionnaire system for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) replaces the previous version of the questionnaire for companies with a lower minimum size.

3. Disclosure of financial impact

From 2024, companies will have to disclose how environmental issues affect their financial performance. This is in line with global standards such as CSRD, which requires companies to make their financial and non-financial risks more transparent.

4. Higher verification standards

From 2023 and 2024, CDP has increased the verification requirements for Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions to 100% (from 70% in 2022). This measure is intended to further increase the accuracy and integrity of reporting.

5. Focus on Scope 3

CDP is placing increasing emphasis on Scope 3 reporting. From 2024, companies wishing to appear on CDP's A-list must demonstrate at least one Scope 3 category with an external verification.

6. Alignment with IFRS S2

Another important update concerns the alignment with IFRS S2 standards (International Financial Reporting Standards).

5-Year Strategy (until the End of 2025)

In 2021, CDP launched a 5-year strategy to expand disclosure topics: These include biodiversity, plastics, land, oceans, waste, food and resilience, recognizing the interconnectedness of nature and Earth's systems, and more.

While the CDP questionnaire focuses primarily on environmental issues, social and governance issues are increasingly included.

CDP also aims to improve the involvement and role of stakeholders in the reporting and analysis process and place a stronger focus on setting future targets and actionable tasks.

Topic-Related Changes and Scoring in 2024

Climate Change, Forests, and Water Security

The introduction of the new integrated questionnaire does not mean that every company will have to address all topics or cross-environmental issues. In 2024, all companies in the complete company questionnaire will continue to be asked to disclose data on climate change.

Companies that have previously been asked about forests and water security are likely to find these topics again in the integrated questionnaire. CDP has outlined the methodology for determining whether a sector will receive questions on water security and forests as follows:

• The Water Watch Tool is used to ask questions about water security.
• For forests, the methodology described in Annex 1 of the document CDP Forests Sample — Investor Request 2023 is used.

A key change for 2024 is that the approach for determining relevant topics or environmental aspects will now be applied universally to all companies at the request of investors and customers.

Previously, supply chains had to specify the topics or environmental issues that their suppliers should address. In the future, CDP will take over this provision and assess it using the CDP activity classification system. This change also applies to companies that are requested to disclose by banks or private investors.

With regard to forests and water security, companies can disclose any dependencies, impacts, risks, or opportunities they have identified to ensure they receive relevant questions.

Plastics in the CDP Questionnaire

From 2024, all companies (except SMEs and public authorities) will be required to submit basic data on plastics. Industries that are strongly affected by plastics issues could be confronted with a broader range of questions.

The identification of plastics activities went beyond production/marketing and also includes waste and/or water management activities, as well as financial products/services related to plastics activities. This expansion should facilitate the future collection of comprehensive metrics covering all plastics-related activities along the value chain.

Questions on Biodiversity

Since 2024, the CDP questionnaire has also asked all companies (with the exception of SMEs and public authorities) basic questions on biodiversity. While in previous years these were only addressed to companies that provided information on climate change in the questionnaire, CDP now recognizes the interaction between biodiversity, climate change and all nature-related issues.

In 2024, the topics of climate change, water security and forests continued to be assessed separately. Despite a standardized questionnaire, companies received a separate CDP score for each topic. Questions on plastics and biodiversity issues were not yet included in the 2024 CDP assessment, but could be included in the 2025 assessment.

Tips from the CDP Adaptation of 2024

Responding to the CDP questionnaire is a complex task that requires careful planning, accurate data and coordinated teamwork. From our experience with clients, we have compiled the following best practices and tips:

1. Make changes and adjustments to answers: Depending on the question and answer, additional questions may be activated in the questionnaire that still need to be answered (and which can be easily overlooked!).
2. Check complex tables: Some questions with tables appear to be completed at first glance, but are still rated as "in progress" by CDP. It is therefore important to expand tables completely and check that all cells are filled in — they often contain extensive information that is easily overlooked.
3. Use required units for the data: Work closely with your team to ensure consistency of data and correct use of units. You may be working internally with different units than those specified by CDP for data entry.
4. Allow sufficient time: Start sufficiently in advance of the deadline with a final data check and a sanity check of the entire questionnaire to ensure a correct data basis for the evaluation. We recommend that you ideally allow 2 to 4 weeks for the sanity check.
5. Working together for success: Comprehensive questionnaires such as CDP's require collaboration between different departments. Early and close cooperation between sustainability, finance, IT, HR and other teams is crucial.

CDP: Building a Universal System to Respond to Various Sustainability Requests

With the new EU sustainability legislation and standards as well as existing data disclosure platforms such as CDP, responding to all sustainability requests each year is becoming a huge project that is difficult to manage. Given that there are many new legal requirements to fulfill in the coming years, it will be difficult to keep up with sustainability data disclosure. Implementing a system to automate the overlap in data collection, tracking and reporting can help you overcome this challenge.

Process Preparation for Efficient Response and Reporting

Since the sustainability area is interdisciplinary, employees from all departments of your company must ultimately be involved in data collection and reporting. Therefore, using automated ESG software to collect data, policies, metrics and responses to various queries is very helpful.

Sunhat's ESG software optimizes your reporting process through several features:

• Similarity Score and Suggested Responses: Sunhat recognizes overlaps between frameworks and makes it easy to reuse existing responses, such as between CDP questionnaires and ESRS disclosures, without additional work.
• Tagging and search function: Answers can be tagged and searched specifically for topics such as energy consumption or greenhouse gas emissions to quickly find relevant content.
• Project management: The software enables efficient distribution of tasks within the team, improves communication and reduces errors as well as the workload caused by emails.

Using ESG software such as Sunhat allows you to respond faster to sustainability queries, regardless of whether you have saved responses from previous years or whether questions from different ratings and ESG reports overlap.

Book a demo now to learn how Sunhat can help you with your next CDP assessment!