What’s New in CDP for 2025: Key Updates and Impacts
Since its launch in 2000, CDP has grown to become the world’s largest voluntary environmental disclosure platform for companies, cities, states, and regions. It facilitates reporting across three key sustainability themes: Climate Change, Water Security, and Forests.
In 2024, more than 640 capital market signatories, representing over $127 trillion in assets, requested disclosures from over 31,500 companies through CDP. The resulting scores provide investors and stakeholders with insight into how deeply sustainability is embedded within corporate strategies and help assess environmental risks-particularly those linked to climate, water security, and forests, across portfolios.
As the world moves toward a 2050 net-zero target amid ongoing political uncertainty, transparent and consistent sustainability reporting is becoming not just a best practice but a strategic imperative. CDP enables organisations to demonstrate accountability while sharpening their long-term ambitions for a more resilient, low-carbon future.
Key Changes
Unlike the significant changes introduced last year by CDP, including changes to the portal, questionnaire and scoring methodology, the 2025 questionnaire maintains a streamlined approach with minimal changes. The portal interface, as well as the questions, remain the same with minor changes to the language of the guidance and scoring criteria.
Changes to the Corporate Disclosure
Response to the integrated questionnaire: despite the integration of the three questionnaires (Climate Change, Forests and Water Security), companies are not expected to respond to all the themes. All companies are required to respond to Climate Change, and their response to Water and Forests is dependent on how material these issues are to the business. Companies can use the Industry Impact Classification report to determine if they are required to respond to multiple questionnaires.
Updates to the Water questionnaire: there have been no significant changes to the questionnaire and guidance for water since last year. The main changes are focused on the questions related to facility-level information and water-related targets.
Changes to the Scoring Methodology
There have been no significant changes to the scoring methodology in 2025. Any changes have been related to updating the wording to improve clarity and consistency of scoring.
Scoring of forests and water financing activities: 2025 will be the first year where scores for the forests and water financing activities for the financial services (FS) sector will be made public.
Updates to the SME scoring guidance: From 2025 onwards, SME scoring thresholds have been adjusted to reflect accurately the performance of SME organisations. Just like last year, SME A level will not be scored and the maximum score an organisation can receive through this questionnaire will be an SME B score.
Key Dates
How Orbis Advisory Can Support You
At Orbis Advisory, we believe that CDP is not only a form of sustainability assessment but also a way to support companies to make meaningful changes to prepare for a net-zero world. We support businesses by conducting a thorough gap analysis and score check using our bespoke score check tool and identifying areas of strength and weaknesses of the company. We also support with the actual drafting of the responses to reduce your reporting burden by analysing internal and publicly available documents. Post submission, Orbis Advisory can support you for future submissions by creating an improvement plan to ensure a more complete submission and a better score.
CDP closely aligns with various ESG and climate-focused disclosures such as CSRD, TCFD and SBTi, making it a one-stop place to report on all relevant disclosures. Orbis Advisory believes that companies should use this as an opportunity to align their sustainability ambitions to these disclosures. With expertise in compliance, measurement, and reporting, we can also support your company with TCFD and create a decarbonisation pathway, in line with SBTi, which will help with strengthening your CDP score in the future.
Please get in touch to learn more about our CDP offerings and other services to strengthen your CDP score and future sustainability pathway. Contact our sustainability experts at info@orbisadvisory.com today to start improving your CDP performance.
