Why the request lands on your desk
CDP, formerly known as the Carbon Disclosure Project, is a not-for-profit environmental disclosure system that large companies use to collect climate and environmental data from their suppliers. If one of your customers runs a CDP supply chain programme, the request does not depend on your own size: one large buyer is enough to pull small and mid-sized suppliers into the request behind it. It usually arrives as an invitation from a procurement or sustainability contact, sometimes alongside a tender or an annual supplier review. Banks and investors run comparable requests through their own CDP programmes, and the request is rarely a one-off: in the 2025 cycle, over 270 major buyers requested data from around 45,000 suppliers through CDP’s supply chain programme, and the same request tends to return every year.
What CDP actually asks for
Since 2024, CDP has run one integrated corporate questionnaire rather than separate forms for each topic. Every company that discloses answers the climate change section: governance, risks, targets and emissions data, mainly your Scope 1 and Scope 2 greenhouse gas emissions. Water security and forests only appear when the requesting customer has switched them on, typically because your sector or supply chain touches water-intensive processes or forest-risk commodities. Plastics and biodiversity questions are collected in the same questionnaire but are not yet scored.
How the questionnaire scales to your size
Size decides which version of the questionnaire you face. Companies with under 500 employees and under US$50 million in revenue qualify for the shorter SME (small and mid-sized enterprise) version, which close to 11,000 companies used in the 2025 cycle; above those thresholds, the full corporate questionnaire applies. Both versions ask for real figures rather than intentions: emissions numbers built from your own invoices, meter readings and fleet data, with spend-based estimates allowed where primary data is missing, provided the estimation method is stated and the figure is clearly labelled as an estimate rather than presented as measured.
How scoring works
CDP scores each issue you disclose on independently, on a scale from D minus up to A, moving through the bands Disclosure, Awareness, Management and Leadership as the evidence of governance, targets and action gets stronger. The score reflects what your company actually does and how well that is evidenced in the response, not how neatly the form is filled in. Because CDP determines every score itself, based on your answers, nobody preparing a response on your behalf can promise a particular score or band.
This year’s dates, and what happens if you miss them
CDP runs one cycle per year on fixed dates. For 2026, the scoring deadline of 16 September has already passed, and the questionnaire stays open for late responses until it closes for good in the week of 26 October, after which nothing in it can be changed. A response submitted after the scoring deadline but before closure is recorded but not scored for the year. Staying silent is visible too: CDP marks companies that were invited to disclose and did not respond with a failure to respond status, which the requesting customer can see. The next annual cycle is expected to open around mid-2027, and each cycle is also a chance to close gaps a customer or your own review found the previous year, whether that is a missing policy, a meter reading nobody logged, or an emissions figure that was estimated rather than measured.
Where Humboldt fits
Humboldt builds your CDP questionnaire response from your own invoices, meter readings and documents, with every value traced to a source or clearly labelled as an estimate, and our ESG (Environmental, Social and Governance) expert checks and signs the work before you see it. More detail on the CDP questionnaire response.