Environmental accountability is now a core business priority. Many organisations are expected to measure, manage, and disclose their environmental impact with increasing accuracy and transparency. CDP (Carbon Disclosure Project) provides a globally recognised framework for this, but to achieve a score, the process can be complex to navigate.
What is CDP?
CDP is a global non-profit that enables organisations to disclose their environmental impact through a structured reporting framework. Its annual questionnaires cover areas such as climate change, water, and forests.
Depending on which modules are relevant to them, organisations submit data on things like governance, strategy, climate risks/ opportunities etc., creating a consistent and comparable view of environmental performance for investors, stakeholders, and policymakers.
In 2025, more than 22,100 companies disclosed environmental data through CDP, representing over half of global market capitalisation. This includes many of the world’s largest and most influential organisations, reflecting the growing importance of environmental disclosure in business decision-making.
Why is CDP Important?
CDP plays a critical role in driving meaningful environmental change.
By standardising how environmental impact is measured and disclosed, it enables organisations to better understand and reduce emissions, resource use, and climate-related risks. This transparency supports accountability, making environmental performance visible and actionable.
Participation in CDP therefore reflects a commitment to responsible business practice. It shows that an organisation is actively working to understand and manage their environmental impact.
As a result, environmental responsibility increasingly supports business performance. In 2025, 640 investors representing US$127 trillion in assets called on companies to disclose through CDP, reflecting the growing importance of transparent environmental reporting in investment and procurement decisions.
With CDP scoring companies from A – D, organisations that engage with CDP and achieve a higher score can strengthen investor confidence, build stakeholder trust, and improve risk management. This makes environmental transparency both an ethical responsibility and a commercial advantage.
Despite this, delivering CDP reporting is a complex process, and it is not always straightforward to achieve a desired score.
What Are the Main Pain Points of the CDP Process?
While CDP provides a strong framework for environmental disclosure, translating its requirements into a strong submission can be challenging in practice.
One of the most significant barriers is the scoring guidance itself.
CDP provides detailed scoring criteria alongside its questionnaires, outlining what is required to achieve higher scores. However, this guidance is extensive and often complex, requiring careful interpretation to understand what applies to a specific organisation.
A common challenge is that organisations may already have relevant governance or climate-related processes in place internally, but struggle to recognise how these activities should be evidenced against CDP scoring criteria.
For many organisations, this creates a gap between intent and execution.
Understanding CDP guidance requires time and expertise. Applying it requires a clear view of existing processes, data, and capabilities. According to recent ESG reporting research, fewer than 30% of organisations feel confident in the accuracy of their ESG data, highlighting the wider difficulty of producing consistent, audit-ready sustainability information. Without this, it becomes difficult to identify what improvements are needed, or how to prioritise them.
As a result, organisations may submit incomplete responses, miss opportunities to strengthen their CDP score, or struggle to move beyond basic compliance.
Addressing this challenge is key not only for organisations, but for CDP itself. When scoring guidance is easier to interpret and apply, more organisations can participate effectively, improving both the quality and consistency of environmental disclosure.
How Does EA Relieve These Pain Points?
EA closes the gap between CDP requirements and practical implementation.
By using the EA platform to generate your CDP disclosure, we can interpret CDP scoring guidance in the context of how your business actually operates. This removes the need to work through complex guidance in isolation and makes it clear what is relevant to your score and what is not.
To do this, we identify targeted opportunities to improve your score. These are not generic recommendations, but practical actions grounded in your current data, making them realistic to implement and easier to prioritise.
Alongside this, we produce a structured first draft CDP response, giving you a clear starting point rather than a blank page. This means that more time can be spent improving your score rather than completing a full CDP response from scratch.
This approach reduces the time and effort required to complete CDP, while also supporting a more strategic, long-term improvement in performance.
Overall
For organisations looking to simplify their CDP process and improve their performance, the challenge is not whether to act, but how to do so with clarity and confidence. With our first draft generation and scoring guidance, EA can provide exactly that.
Interested? Find out more here.