Scoring guidance for companies

This article is for corporate Disclosers and provides information on CDP’s scoring and the guidance materials available for 2024. 

Contents 

Overview of CDP scoring  

Scoring is closely aligned with CDP’s mission – CDP works with market forces to motivate companies to disclose their impacts on the environment and natural resources and take action to reduce negative impacts, highlighting the business case to do so. Ultimately, scoring serves to incentivize companies to measure and manage environmental impacts through disclosing to CDP.  

CDP undertakes scoring by assessing responders against a scoring methodology, which details how each question in the questionnaire will be scored, evaluating the responder’s progress towards environmental stewardship. The scoring methodology provides a roadmap to companies to on how to achieve best practice, and by developing the scoring methodology each year to align with best practice, CDP aims to drive changes in corporate behaviour to improve environmental performance. 

Disclosers responding to the full version of the 2024 CDP questionnaire will receive a score if they respond by the scoring deadline of 9th October. Disclosers responding to the SME version of the questionnaire will receive a score if they are submitting a response by the scoring deadline above.  

If you have been requested to disclose and do not submit a response, your organization may receive an ‘F’ score. An ‘F’ indicates a failure to provide CDP with sufficient information to be evaluated and is not a reflection of your environmental stewardship. 

 
Scoring guidance materials 

In 2024, the CDP corporate questionnaires on climate change, forests and water security have been integrated into one corporate questionnaire. Through this questionnaire, organizations can provide data on multiple environmental issues in a single disclosure, encouraging more holistic and balanced reporting. Each of CDP’s corporate questionnaire issues (climate change, forests and water) has an individual scoring methodology. CDP is committed to transparency and as such provides the full scoring methodology for each environmental issue.  

Before completing the corporate questionnaire, we strongly recommend you read the Scoring Introduction document which provides a summary of CDP’s approach to scoring. 

You can find all our scoring guidance materials on our guidance for companies page. This includes the following guidance for each questionnaire:

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