This article is for Disclosers and provides guidance for parent and subsidiary companies reporting via CDP. This article covers the preferred approach of a consolidated response from the parent company, as well as the process for both parents and subsidiaries to respond.
Contents
- Preferred approach to parent-subsidiary reporting
- Guidance for parent companies
- Guidance for subsidiary companies
Preferred approach to parent-subsidiary reporting
The preferred approach is for parent companies to respond on behalf of their subsidiary companies by submitting a consolidated response to CDP, which includes all subsidiary data.
This is in line with GHG Protocol, and the International Sustainability Standards Board’s IFRS S2. We recommend a consolidated responses to ensure the parent company has complete oversight of all requests at both the subsidiary and parent levels. It also has the added benefit of reducing the reporting burden since it avoids both the parent and subsidiary submitting a response.
While the above outlines the preferred approach, parent companies can disclose a consolidated or independent response from their subsidiaries and choose to respond for as many or as few of their direct subsidiaries as they wish.
Guidance for parent companies
Once signed into the Portal, parent companies will see their direct requests in the ‘REQUESTED’ tab, found in their ‘Requests’ page. Click the ‘Requests’ button on the left navigation panel to access this tab.
Note: if a parent doesn’t have a request themselves, they won’t be able to view the subsidiary requests.
To accept subsidiary requests, parent companies should:
- Navigate to their ‘Requests’ page and open the ‘SUBSIDIARIES’ tab.
- Navigate to the desired individual subsidiary in the list.
- Click the arrow on the far right of the desired subsidiary to open the requested organization details window. This will show the environmental issues covered by the subsidiary’s requests as well as the number of requests that subsidiary has received.
- Click the red button ‘Merge your subsidiary’s requests’ to accept those requests within your own reporting. This will also prevent the subsidiary from being able to respond to those requests themselves.
Important: If the subsidiary has already started responding, their progress will be lost when the parent company takes the subsidiary’s requests. A warning message will appear notifying the parent company of this.
Important: only the user with the Submission Lead role can merge requests.
After merging a subsidiary’s requests with their own, a new ‘DELEGATED’ requests tab will appear on the parent’s ‘Requests’ page. This tab will show all the requests that have moved from that subsidiary to the parent. If that subsidiary had a subsidiary of its own, the latter subsidiary’s requests would also move up to the overall parent. In this instance, multiple companies (both the subsidiary and the subsidiary’s subsidiary) will show on the parent’s ‘DELEGATED’ requests tab, as below.
Important: Organizations which have already activated their questionnaire must manually resubmit their questionnaire setup after merging a new subsidiary to ensure all customers are listed in the relevant questions of the response. Any questionnaire progress already made will not be lost when resubmitting the questionnaire set up. See our article on how to re-submit the questionnaire setup for more guidance on this.
Important: If you have already submitted your response, please ensure that you click on ‘Edit submission’ before you accept the request. If you do not take this step, you will not be able to resubmit the questionnaire set up. Please see our article on how to edit your response for more guidance. If you edit your response prior to the scoring deadline, please ensure you resubmit your response by the September 17 scoring deadline. After the scoring deadline, you can continue to edit and resubmit your response to accept late requests.
Guidance for subsidiary companies
All your requests will appear on the ‘Requests’ page in the Portal by default. The subsidiary can respond to their requests, unless these requests are ‘merged’ by their parent, in which case the subsidiary can no longer respond separately.
If a parent is disclosing on the subsidiary’s behalf, this will be clearly stated in the ‘Requests’ page. This section will also explain that if a parent has taken over their response and this was unwanted, they can contact CDP for support. CDP can manually change the delegation of requests if needed, although agreement from the parent company is required.
You may also find the following articles helpful: