This article is for:
- Workspace members with the ESG role
CDP — formerly Carbon Disclosure Project — is a nonprofit organization that scores organizations on an annual basis based on their environmental transparency and action. When your company responds to CDP, it can help:
- Identify how to manage its environmental risks and opportunities
- Disclose information about its climate impact to customers and investors
- Provide the market with vital research and insight
To determine its 2024 scores, CDP developed:
- A single, integrated corporate questionnaire, instead of separate questionnaires for Climate, Water, and Forests as in 2023
- A streamlined CDP Portal for tailored submissions, focused on only questions relevant to your company
Note: If necessary, register your company with CDP to specify your sector and activity classification, and set up who will use the CDP Portal.
With Workiva's ESG solution, you can collect responses to submit CDP 2024 questionnaire.
Tip: To help ease 2024 CDP submissions, you can request the CDP'24 Spreadsheet, set up to enable collaboration as you craft responses for every possible question of the full corporate questionnaire.
Step 1. Include CDP in ESG Explorer
From ESG Explorer's ESG Admin panel, select CDP in Frameworks.
Tip: From the ESG Admin panel, you can also include content from CDP 2023 questionnaires, such as for historical reference. In Frameworks, choose which CDP 2023 questionnaires to include — Climate, Forests, or Water.
While the CDP Portal tailors its questions to the sector and size of your company, the CDP content includes all questions possible through the questionnaire's pathways:
- The full corporate questionnaire — which includes sector-specific data points — tailored for large organizations with a headcount greater than 1,000 or annual revenue over $250M USD
- The small/medium enterprise (SME) questionnaire — sections 14 through 21 of the CDP content — tailored for smaller organizations with a headcount of less than 500 and annual revenue less than $50M USD
Note: CDP has a specific scoring methodology for organizations that respond to the SME questionnaire. Even if your organization qualifies for the SME questionnaire, you may want to still complete the full corporate questionnaire, such as based on your stakeholders' desires.
Tip: If your organization has a headcount of 500-1,000 or annual revenue of $50M-250M USD, CDP recommends you complete the full corporate questionnaire.
Step 2. Review CDP questions and guidance
From ESG Explorer, you can search and browse the content of the CDP questionnaires. In addition to the questions, your can review their related guidance from CDP, including:
- Response options when you respond in the CDP Portal
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Scoring criteria based on environmental issue — Climate change (CC), Forests (F), or Water (W) — and sector:
- Agricultural commodities (AC)
- Capital goods (CG)
- Cement (CE)
- Chemicals (CH)
- Coal (CO)
- Construction (CN)
- Electric utilities (EU)
- Financial services (FS)
- Food, beverage, and tobacco (FB)
- Metals and mining (MM)
- Oil and gas (OG)
- Paper and forestry (PF)
- Real estate (RE)
- Steel (ST)
- Transport — OEMS (TO)
- Transport — OEMS-EPM (TO-EPM)
- Transport service (TS)
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Tags to indicate:
- Authority type, such as capital or private markets, RE100, or the Net Zero Asset Managers Initiative
- Environmental issue — Climate change, Forests, or Water
- Sector
- Pathways, projects, and initiatives
As your review the CDP questionnaire in ESG Explorer, you can:
- Search and browse its content
- Connect its content to ESG Program metrics
- Add comments to questions, such as to capture conversations with collaborators as you craft their responses
Step 3. Collect questionnaire responses
To help curate and track data collection, set up a metric for each question's response.
- In Related ESG content, add the CDP question the metric aligns with.
Tip: If your metrics have Related ESG content connected to 2023 CDP content, you can request a roll forward to automatically add their corresponding 2024 CDP questions.
- In Metric assignment, assign the question to specific workspace members to prepare and approve its response, and set their due dates. You can also provide instructions to help ensure CDP accepts the submission.
Tip: For qualitative responses, you can collect and collaborate on these narratives in a Spreadsheet or Document, and connect it as a source for a metric's Text value.
After you set up the metric, click Send tasks to notify the assignee and approvers. From ESG Program, you can track data collection from the metric, topic, or Program overview.
Step 4. Submit responses to CDP
To complete your submission, sign in to the CDP Portal, then copy and paste each question's response from Workiva, such as from ESG Program or the Factbook Spreadsheet.