Join Ecometrica’s award winning customers in preparing for CDP 2018

by Ecometrica’s Head of Client Services, Adam Leaver

Following CDP’s ‘Reimagining Disclosure’ consolation process undertaken during 2017, the requirements for submission have been revised across all their Climate Change, Water, Forests and Supply Chain reporting frameworks. The new 2018 CDP questionnaires reflect increasing interest from the investor community in business environmental impacts and management of risk and opportunities around sustainability. It’s also a recognition of increasing sophistication amongst businesses responding to the CDP, many of which have been submitting carbon emissions data and details of climate change management strategies for several years.

Following the New Year, thoughts turn to the 2018 submission to CDP and the June 2018 deadline, particularly as ‘Reimagining Disclosure’ has introduced several changes to the structure of the CDP submission process. CDP have introduced an expanded set of sector specific questionnaires along with some changes to the questionnaire format and requirements for carbon emissions data which will affect all responding organisations.

New Sector-Specific Questionnaires

The introduction of sector specific questions expands on the need for additional detail or flexibility in reporting – for instance CDP will ask for organisations in the electric utilities or transport services sector to report against a specific set of criteria.  Much of this change will be accommodated within the existing data collecting activities of most CDP respondents, and Ecometrica has already begun working with our customers in preparation for the changing CDP questionnaire.   The sectors that have been assigned their own specific questionnaires are split into four clusters, and are detailed below:

Energy Cluster: Oil & Gas / Electric utilities / Coal
Transport Cluster: Transport vehicle manufacturers / Transport services
Materials Cluster: Metals & mining / Chemicals / Cement / Steel
Agricultural Cluster: Agricultural Commodities / Paper & Forestry / Food, beverage & Tobacco

For some sectors (e.g. Agricultural Commodities), there will be further encouragement to report against all three of CDP’s Climate Change, Water and Forests programmes.  In some areas, the reporting criteria is becoming more robust.  The consultation, for instance, mentions substantive changes to the submission around context-based reporting – being able to identify water withdrawals from stressed water basins – and geolocation data for facilities exposed to significant risks.

Other Changes for 2018

In addition to Sector specific reporting requirements, CDP are looking to adopt the recommendations from the Task Force for Climate-Related Financial Disclosure (TCFD) into their questionnaire framework.  The most significant impact of these changes for CDP responders will be around how to undertake and incorporate climate change risk analysis into planning, strategy, and risk and opportunities reporting.

There have also been some changes to the data required for submission, again principally around the Climate Change questionnaire – it’s never too early to begin reviewing the available data to ensure the new CDP requirements can be accommodated.  Most of these changes are fairly straight forward – particularly if you are already using Ecometrica’s Sustainability Platform – although some may require responding organisations to consider how granular some elements of their data is.

The Very Best CDP Reporting with Ecometrica

Of course, Ecometrica works year-round to ensure data quality and reported data is robust and flexible enough to meet the needs of a variety of environmental and sustainability reporting needs.

As CDP’s only Gold Software Partner for Climate Change, Water and Forests, we’re already working on behalf of our clients to ensure their CDP submissions are complete, timely and as pain free as possible. Our Gold Partner status means that Ecometrica is ideally positioned to assist with reporting across all programmes and with the coming changes to disclosures in 2018.

We offer consulting support for the qualitative elements of CDP and related reporting schemes. We act as an expert third party to review your disclosure before submission, a service designed to improve completeness of disclosure and review the quality of reporting, resulting in a higher CDP score and ranking.

Find out about our CDP Response Service, and see how we helped all our large listed customers improve their CDP scores last year.