Our Guide to the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP)

CDP, formerly the Carbon Disclosure Project, collects environmental data from companies, cities, states and regions, and makes it available to investors, customers and policymakers. Through its annual questionnaire, organisations report on greenhouse gas emissions, climate risks, water use and deforestation.

Its aim is to make environmental data more transparent and to help organisations measure, track and reduce their impact, which in turn can strengthen their investor and stakeholder relations.

The 2027 cycle starts earlier than previous ones, with the response window opening in the week of 26 April 2027, so the new dates are worth checking early.

According to CDP's 2026 disclosure data, the companies disclosing through CDP represent nearly two thirds of global market capitalisation, including 75% of the S&P 500 and 78% of the STOXX Europe 600.

Companies and other entities take part by submitting self-reported data through the CDP Portal in response to annual questionnaires, whose questions cover climate change risks and opportunities, carbon emissions, energy efficiency, water use and deforestation.

When Was CDP Founded, and How Is It Run?

CDP was founded in 2000. Since then, it has become one of the largest sources of global environmental performance data for investors and other stakeholders.

Beyond collecting data, CDP scores each company's responses, and singling out sector leaders is meant to push others towards better environmental performance. In doing so, it encourages action, accountability and transparency in support of a sustainable economy.

According to CDP's About page, CDP has operated as an international non-profit made up of CDP Worldwide (UK), CDP North America, Inc. (US) and CDP Japan, directed by a board of trustees and a board of directors. In June 2026, CDP announced that it will become two separate organisations: CDP, a commercial entity backed by the investment firm Permira that keeps running the disclosure system, and CDP Foundation, a charity focused on science that stays on as a shareholder. CDP expects the change to complete within six months of the announcement, subject to regulatory approvals, and says its products, services and 2026 disclosure cycle continue as planned. The admin fees that disclosing companies pay, covered below, go toward CDP's tools and technology.

The cards below give a snapshot of CDP, with figures taken from CDP's About page and its supply chain page as of November 2026.

CDP states its purpose as surfacing new information that enables Earth-positive decisions to protect future generations, and its vision as a world where people, planet and profit are balanced. To get there, it engages investors, companies, cities and governments, so that they measure their environmental impact, become more aware of it and make preventing dangerous climate change a business norm.

The data gathered through that measurement then gives these entities guidance on how to reduce their environmental footprint.

What Are the Core Values of CDP?

CDP lists four values on its website: we move together, we find solutions, we champion transparency and we promote optimism.

In practice, CDP helps companies better understand the financial risks of climate change, for example through climate-related financial disclosures, and their wider environmental risks.

CDP built its disclosure system to address global risks such as climate change, biodiversity loss and water scarcity. By taking a data-driven approach, it encourages key economic stakeholders to understand their own contribution to these issues, so that they can prevent environmental damage.

In practice, companies and other entities supply their information to CDP's platform, either because a requester asks for it or because they choose to disclose on their own behalf as self-selected companies.

Requesters can be Capital Markets Signatories (investors), Supply Chain members, Banks program members, Private Markets members and members of the RE100 initiative led by Climate Group. The cards below explain why each of the main requesters asks for data.

What Are the Deadlines for CDP?

CDP runs one disclosure cycle a year. The 2026 cycle had its scoring deadline in the week of 14 September and closed on 28 October, whereas CDP's 2027 timeline starts earlier, so that stakeholders can use their data and scores to meet internal deadlines.

Scoring is mainly automated, according to CDP's FAQ: CDP-trained accredited scoring partners assess open-text responses, and CDP's internal team collates the results and runs data quality checks. Companies score higher when they disclose transparently and show ongoing improvement, although the exact methodology changes each year.

What Are the 2027 CDP Deadlines?

Because CDP publishes these dates by week and may adjust them, companies should check the CDP Disclosure 2027 hub before planning internal deadlines. The hub also says that the 2027 response window is one month shorter than in previous cycles, and CDP expects to offer on-demand extensions for the scoring deadline, as it does in 2026.

What Kind of Scoring Scale Does CDP Use?

CDP scores companies from D- to A across four bands: Disclosure (D- or D), Awareness (C- or C), Management (B- or B) and Leadership (A- or A). A company that Capital Markets Signatories asked to disclose and that does not respond is marked "Did not disclose", a status that CDP says reflects missing information to evaluate and carries no verdict on the company's environmental stewardship.

The top performers make the A List. CDP announced the 2025 list on 8 January 2026, with 877 companies, and as of November 2026 its Scores and A Lists page now shows 899 companies on it, about 5% of the nearly 20,000 companies scored.

Companies can review the exact scoring methodology on the CDP website, where it is updated each year to follow the latest international developments.

CDP asks for information on a wide range of business operations. Companies self-report through the CDP questionnaire, answering the questions that relate to issues material to their activities.

Since 2024, CDP has used a single corporate questionnaire in place of its three separate climate change, forests and water security questionnaires. Climate questions apply to every company, whereas forests and water questions apply only where a request, the company's sector or a self-assessment triggers them, or where the company opts in. Companies answering the full questionnaire also respond to supplementary plastics and biodiversity questions, which are not scored for Disclosure, and since 2026 CDP has added ocean-related questions.

What Does the Climate Change Module Cover?

The climate change module asks for data on GHG emissions, energy use and internal carbon pricing (if any), all of which relate to climate risks. It follows the TCFD recommendations and IFRS S2, as the comparison with other frameworks below explains.

Some modules are sector-specific, and CDP assigns sectors through its Activity Classification System, so companies also answer questions tied to their own activities.

What Do the Water Security and Forests Modules Cover?

The cards below show what CDP says about the water security and forests modules.

CDP charges companies an annual admin fee to disclose. Companies pay when a Capital Markets Signatory requests their disclosure or when they disclose voluntarily as a Self-Selected Company, and the amount depends on region and fee tier.

What Are the CDP Fee Tiers?

CDP offers three fee tiers: Enhanced, Foundation and Essential, although Essential is not available in the UK or Europe. The Enhanced tier adds benefits such as a comparative analysis report that benchmarks a company's disclosure against 10 peers of its choice. Fees rose by about 5% globally in 2026.

Who Is Exempt From the CDP Fee?

Companies do not pay the admin fee if their only requests come from Supply Chain members, Banks Program members, Private Markets members or the RE100 initiative. A request from a Capital Markets Signatory changes that, since the company then pays, while cities, states and regions disclose without an admin fee.

Required fees appear in the CDP Portal before disclosure, and the exact amounts for every region are on CDP's FAQ page.

These are CDP's 2026 rates. They exclude local taxes and apply equally to the SME and full questionnaires. CDP had not published 2027 fees at the time of writing (November 2026), so CDP's FAQ page remains the reference for current amounts.

CDP encourages companies to self-report their environmental data through its questionnaires, and it calls this type of disclosure a self-selected company (SSC) response.

SSCs pay the administrative fee, which varies by fee tier and region. Like a company reporting by request, an SSC has its responses made available to the investors who participate in CDP, and it receives a score if it answers the full corporate questionnaire by the scoring deadline, under the same methodology as other companies. Smaller companies that meet CDP's eligibility rules, based on the revenue and headcount entered in the questionnaire setup, can choose the simplified SME questionnaire instead of the full one. Supply chain members and other stakeholders, such as initiatives like RE100, can see an SSC's response only if the company makes it public. SSCs register to disclose through CDP's Help Center.

Disclosure through CDP stays voluntary, and no law requires a company to respond. Even so, a request from a major investor is hard to ignore, because companies that Capital Markets Signatories asked to disclose and that do not respond are marked "Did not disclose" in the data those investors see.

Reporting to CDP is a way to address the global risks of climate change, deforestation and water security, and it demonstrates a company's accountability and transparency. Since these risks have intensified for decades, they call for sustained action and global mobilisation towards a low carbon economy.

Reporting also lets companies show their environmental targets and commitments, and the data collection it involves is the first step towards reducing environmental impact and meeting climate disclosure requirements.

CDP incentivises action as well, by giving interested parties information on environmental sustainability that drives investor and consumer responses.

What Does Contributing to CDP's Database Achieve?

The information supports comparisons across industry sectors through benchmarking and environmental management. CDP's guidance and framework also help companies improve their targets to align with science, report their carbon data and collect information through the CDP Portal.

Contributing to CDP's database also improves the global knowledge base on key environmental issues, since the database tracks increases and decreases in critical natural resources and greenhouse gas emissions. Recognition on the A List adds prestige and encourages stronger competition towards sustainability goals.

Who Benefits From CDP Disclosure?

Companies that stand out on environmental performance can strengthen their relationships with the people who fund, buy from and work for them, each for different reasons. The cards below show how four groups can benefit.

CDP disclosure also gives companies a stronger awareness of their own risks and opportunities, which can improve their overall business strategy. Finally, companies that report to CDP face less of an administrative hurdle when governments start to require emissions or climate risk data through regulation.

CDP often appears alongside GRI, TCFD and ISSB in reporting plans, yet it plays a different role. GRI, TCFD and ISSB define what companies should disclose, while CDP is the platform that collects and scores their environmental data. In practice, companies report to CDP using data shaped by those standards, which is why the alignment between them matters.

That is also why CDP maps its questionnaire onto the standards. According to CDP's framework alignment page, the questionnaire is partially aligned with four GRI Standards: Climate Change (102), Energy (103), Water and Effluents (303) and Biodiversity (101), and CDP and GRI have also published a joint mapping of GRI 102 and 103.

On climate, CDP's datapoints have followed the TCFD recommendations since 2018, and since 2024 the questionnaire has also been aligned with IFRS S2, the ISSB climate standard that CDP calls the foundational baseline for its climate disclosure.

The TCFD itself has changed hands in the meantime. After the Task Force completed its work, the Financial Stability Board asked the IFRS Foundation to take over monitoring companies' climate-related disclosures, and the IFRS Foundation says that companies applying IFRS S1 and S2 will meet the TCFD recommendations.

The same applies to European regulation. For companies preparing for the CSRD, CDP states that it is substantially aligned with the pre-Omnibus ESRS climate standard (ESRS E1), and that it will publish mappings for the revised ESRS once they are formally adopted. Responding to CDP does not by itself make a company compliant with ISSB or CSRD. Well-structured CDP data, however, does shorten that work.

Companies disclose through the CDP Portal. Once a company has been requested or has registered, its dashboard shows which requesters asked for its data and which questionnaires it needs to answer, and the steps below show how the process runs.

Reporting to CDP can be challenging the first few times a company logs in, so CDP provides support to make disclosure easier, with guidance on its website and in the CDP Portal.

How Do These Resources Help Companies Disclosing to CDP?

In the CDP Portal, companies can preview the questionnaire, the guidance and the scoring methodologies, and export them as PDFs. CDP's question bank and glossaries also explain what it asks and why.

Smaller companies can respond through CDP's SME questionnaire, which nearly 11,000 companies used in 2025, according to CDP. Since 2026, it can award an A score for climate change, although CDP notes that the SME A is not equivalent to the full corporate A. CDP is also gradually introducing an optional AI feature that pulls relevant data from unstructured documents into a response.

If you want strong support with your CDP reporting, Greenly's team can help.

Additional Resources for CDP

For questions the website does not answer, disclosing companies can turn to the Help Center, webinars, workshops and other events offered by CDP.

Companies also ask which actions earn a higher score. The right strategy depends on the overall business strategy, so no single solution fits every company. To explore options, organisations can read CDP's "Organisational Guide for Environmental Action", which sets out a roadmap of company actions and case studies.

One-on-One CDP Assistance

CDP's Reporter Services programme offers companies structured guidance, including Score Feedback Calls, Gap Analysis Calls and a Final Review of the draft response before the deadline. In 2026, the Score Feedback and Gap Analysis Calls are open to all companies, not only members, although availability for non-members may be limited. External support is also available from Accredited Solutions Providers (ASPs).

If your company needs help with more than CDP, such as the TCFD, the CSRD or the SBTi, Greenly's platform lets you answer once and apply the answers across frameworks, with exports for CDP, so the same emissions data feeds your CDP response and your other reports.

If reading this article has inspired you to consider your company's own carbon footprint, Greenly is here to assist you.

At Greenly, we can help you assess your company's carbon footprint, and then give you the tools you need to cut down on emissions. We offer a free demo so you can better understand our platform and all that it has to offer, including assistance with boosting supplier engagement, personalised assistance and new ways to involve your employees.

Learn more about Greenly's carbon management platform.