CDP Reporting Framework

CDP disclosure is relevant to companies that receive a formal request and to organizations that choose to disclose voluntarily. It is especially important for organizations that are:

• Requested to disclose by CDP capital markets signatories, banks, customers, supply-chain members or participating initiatives.
• Publicly traded or regularly assessed by investors and lenders on climate and nature-related performance.
• Part of global supply chains in which customers require comparable environmental data from suppliers.
• Operating in emissions-, water-, land-, resource- or nature-intensive sectors.
• Trying to reuse one controlled dataset across CDP, ISSB, ESRS, TNFD, GRI and internal management reporting.
• Building a first structured environmental disclosure through CDP’s small and medium enterprise (SME) questionnaire.
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• Questionnaire & guidance published week of April 20. The 2026 questionnaire, reporting guidance, overviews, glossaries and technical notes were released.
• Scoring methodology published week of April 27. The 2026 scoring materials became available in English.
• Response window opened week of June 15. Disclosers could access the questionnaire and begin their response in the CDP Portal.
• Scoring deadline September 16. Submit by this date for score eligibility. Later edits are not scored.
• Final response deadline week of October 26. The questionnaire closes after this deadline and responses can no longer be edited.
• Private and public scores week of November 30. Scores appear in the Portal and public scores and A Lists are published.

Questionnaire setup determines whether an organization receives a full corporate or SME questionnaire and which environmental themes appear. The integrated format does not mean every company answers every datapoint. It means common governance, risk, strategy and engagement questions can be answered once and used across relevant themes.

For the 2026 full corporate questionnaire:

• Climate change datapoints are presented to all disclosers.
• Supplementary biodiversity datapoints are presented to all full corporate disclosers and are unscored.
• Forests and water security appear when requested, assigned through CDP’s impact assessment or selected voluntarily.
• Plastics is available as an opt-in theme and is unscored.
• Ocean is a new opt-in theme for eligible full corporate respondents and is unscored. It is not available to financial services or SME respondents in 2026.

The full questionnaire has 13 modules. Its integrated modules cover introduction, the identification and management of environmental dependencies, impacts, risks and opportunities, governance, business strategy, environmental performance consolidation and sign-off. Issue-specific modules then collect performance data for climate, forests, water, plastics, biodiversity and, where selected, ocean.

CDP issues separate 2026 scores for climate change, forests and water security, and each has its own methodology with final letter scores ranging from A to D- in four areas: disclosure, awareness, management and leadership.

CDP updates its questionnaire, guidance and scoring materials each year. Nature-related disclosure is also moving from broad qualitative statements toward clearer data on dependencies, impacts, risks, opportunities, targets and performance. Organizations should treat CDP as an annual management process rather than a one-off writing exercise.

A practical approach is to establish clear ownership, confirm reporting boundaries, map each response to data and evidence, test the draft against the scoring methodology, and maintain a controlled dataset that can be reused across reporting obligations and stakeholder requests.

CDP has already signposted an earlier and shorter disclosure cycle for 2027. The response window is expected to be one month shorter than in recent years, helping organizations access and use their disclosure data and scores earlier for annual reporting, mandatory submissions, internal planning and other decisions.

CDP is designed to reduce duplication by bringing information from major environmental frameworks and standards into one questionnaire. The corporate questionnaire has strong alignment with the IFRS’s climate standard, ESRS and TNFD, and 2026 deepens connections with GRI, SBTN, the GHG Protocol and the Ellen MacArthur Foundation Global Commitment.

Alignment can make a controlled environmental dataset more reusable, but a CDP response does not automatically establish compliance with IFRS, ESRS, TNFD or any regulation. Companies still need a requirement-by-requirement mapping, a defined reporting boundary and evidence that meets the relevant standard.