CDP sends out carbon questionnaires to 4,500 firms

London, 18 February:
More than 4,500 companies have been sent questionnaires about their greenhouse gas emissions and climate strategies this year by the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP). This is up from 3,700 companies questioned last year.
The number of institutional investors signed up to this year’s CDP request has also increased, to 534 with $64 trillion in assets under management, from 475 investors in 2009, at that time managing around $55 trillion.
Signing up to the request for information this year for the first time were Wells Fargo, BNY Mellon and the Industrial Bank of Korea, among others.
For 10 years, the CDP has asked constituents of the FT500 – the world’s largest listed companies – to disclose investment-related information about climate change. It has gradually increased its reach.
The CDP this year wrote for the first time to companies in Turkey, Peru, Morocco, Egypt and Israel.
The largest global companies reporting to the CDP will be given a performance score on actions they have taken to address climate change, such as setting emission reduction targets, achieved and expected reductions, governance structures and getting their data externally verified.
For the first time, the results will be published in a performance leadership index, expected to be released in September this year.
The CDP has also upgraded its system for reporting this year, introducing online tools developed with Accenture, Microsoft and SAP. Henk de Bruin, head of corporate sustainability at electronics firm Philips, which piloted the upgraded tools, said they “enable greater analysis of the CDP data to benchmark against peers and other sectors and geographies”.