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
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 Sustainability Reporting solution, you can collect responses to submit for your company's CDP questionnaire.
Step 1. Enable CDP in Sustainability Explorer
To view the content of a CDP questionnaire in Sustainability Explorer, select its year — such as 2026 CDP — or All frameworks in the Properties panel.
Tip: From the Properties panel, you can also enable archived CDP questionnaire content, such as for historical reference of previous years' responses.
While the CDP Portal tailors its questions to the sector and size of your company, Sustainability Explorer includes all questions possible through the questionnaire's pathways:
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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
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.
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The small/medium enterprise (SME) questionnaire — sections 14 through 21 — 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.
Step 2. Review CDP questions and guidance
From Sustainability Explorer, you can search and browse the content of the CDP questionnaire.
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 Sustainability Explorer, you can:
- Search and browse its content.
- Align its questions with metrics in Sustainability Program.
- Add comments to questions, such as to discuss materiality or capture decisions with collaborators as you craft responses.
Step 3. Collect and submit responses
To help curate and track responses to CDP questions:
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Align questions with the metrics in Sustainability Program that collect values that help inform their respective responses.
Tip: If you have metrics aligned with archived CDP content, you can request a roll forward to automatically update them with the corresponding content of the current version.
- From Sustainability Explorer, set up your CDP questionnaire and collaborate on responses with other workspace members.
- When responses are ready, update your CDP submission directly from your questionnaire, then complete your submission from the CDP portal.
To learn more, view Craft responses to CDP questionnaire for sustainability reporting.