A working framework for deciding which CDP themes our supply chain actually needs to disclose — and an honest argument for why “we did carbon and water last year” is not a reason to do only carbon and water again.
Mature. The risk here is complacency, not absence — a carbon answer that excludes land-use change is an incomplete carbon answer.
Material because our sites and our tier-1 suppliers sit in stressed basins. That finding was made once — it should be re-made each cycle.
Never tested against the criteria. Not a decision — an omission that has quietly become a habit.
Score each test 0–3 for each theme (carbon, water, forests, plastics, biodiversity). Do it in the room, with procurement data on screen, and write the scores down. A documented “no” is a defensible position. An undocumented “no” is exposure.
Do we buy, at any tier, a material that sits inside the theme’s definition? For forests, run the bill of materials against CDP’s seven forest-risk commodities — including the hidden routes: pulp cartons, natural rubber, soy in animal feed, palm derivatives in surfactants and emulsifiers, leather.
Ask procurement: “Show me spend by material, not by supplier.”
Score 3 if a listed commodity appears in a top-20 spend line.
Impact is local. Map top-spend sites against water stress (WRI Aqueduct) and sourcing origins against deforestation frontiers. A theme is material where our volume meets a stressed place, not where our headquarters happens to be.
Ask sourcing: “Which country of origin, which basin, which volume?”
Score 3 if >20% of volume comes from a high-stress or high-risk landscape.
Disclosure now trails legislation. EUDR (Reg. (EU) 2023/1115) demands geolocated, legality-verified origin for seven commodities placed on the EU market. CSRD/ESRS asks for E1 climate, E3 water and E4 biodiversity. IFRS S2 sets the climate baseline. California SB 253 / SB 261 add a US thread.
Ask legal: “What are we already required to collect?”
Score 3 if a binding requirement lands within 24 months — this test alone can force disclosure.
In CDP Supply Chain we are the responder. Pull the actual requests: which customers invited us, on which themes, and how heavily is each theme weighted in their supplier scorecard? Then check the investor request separately — the two channels do not always ask the same thing.
Ask account management: “Which of our top ten customers scores forests?”
Score 3 if a strategic customer weights the theme in commercial evaluation.
Finally, the quantitative check. If land-related emissions (land-use change plus land management) are a meaningful share of our inventory, forests is not a separate topic — it is the missing half of our carbon number. SBTi’s FLAG guidance requires a separate land-sector target where land-intensive activities exceed 20% of total emissions, and the GHG Protocol Land Sector and Removals Guidance defines how those tonnes are counted. The same logic applies to water intensity per unit of product.
Ask the inventory owner: “What percentage of Scope 3 category 1 comes from agricultural or forest-derived inputs?”
Score 3 if the theme drives >15% of the relevant footprint.
Submit this cycle. Accept a low first-year score — CDP rewards disclosure and improvement, and a first response establishes the baseline everything later is measured against.
Complete the questionnaire internally without submitting. You will find the data gaps in a quiet year rather than a deadline year, and the traceability work starts twelve months earlier.
Not material this cycle. Record the scores, name the trigger that would change them, and re-test next year. This is the only defensible form of “no”.
“We did carbon and water, so we’ll do carbon and water.” That is a budget decision wearing a materiality decision’s clothes.
Last year’s scope is a habit. Materiality is a finding — and findings expire.
Forest-risk commodities almost never arrive labelled. They arrive as corrugated packaging and paper, as leather trim, as natural rubber in tyres and seals, as soy inside animal feed, as palm derivatives inside surfactants, lubricants and cosmetics. Run the bill of materials before answering.
CDP scores the quality of disclosure and the maturity of the process, not perfection. A first-year response that states known volumes, admits the traceability gap and publishes a roadmap scores; silence scores nothing and tells a customer we have not looked.
The regulator has. EUDR requires geolocation of plots of production for its listed commodities — and customers typically ask their suppliers only six to nine months before their own deadline, while origin-level data collection takes nine to twelve. Waiting for the ask guarantees we are late.
CDP scores are issued per theme. A first forests score does not dilute a climate A-. What does damage the climate score, over time, is a Scope 3 inventory that leaves land-use change out and cannot survive assurance.
Less true than it was. Since the 2024 cycle CDP runs a single integrated questionnaire, with themes appearing as modules rather than separate submissions. The marginal cost of adding forests to an existing response is far lower than the cost of standing one up cold.
Then put that in writing: the five test scores, the trigger that reopens it, and the named owner. If forests scores into Disclose and we still defer, we have made a real decision with a real record — which is the whole point of the exercise.
Share this timeline before the scoring exercise. It explains why a scope set in 2022 cannot simply be re-used: nearly every reference point behind it has been rewritten.
The first standard method for setting forest, land and agriculture science-based targets — and the threshold above which a company must set one separately from its energy-and-industry target. Land emissions stop being optional footnote material.
Regulation (EU) 2023/1115 replaces the old timber regulation and covers cattle, cocoa, coffee, oil palm, rubber, soya and wood plus derived products — requiring geolocation of the plots of land where commodities were produced. Traceability becomes a market-access condition, not a reporting nicety.
Nature-related dependencies, impacts, risks and opportunities get a disclosure architecture that mirrors climate’s. Water and forests move from separate “topics” toward one nature narrative.
Effective for annual reporting periods beginning on or after 1 January 2024, with jurisdictions adopting on their own timetables. CDP realigned its climate questions to this wording — one reason the questionnaire looked different that year.
Plastics questions arrive in 2023; from the 2024 cycle climate, water security, forests, plastics and biodiversity sit inside a single corporate questionnaire structured around IFRS S2 and mapped to ESRS. The practical consequence for us: adding a theme is now a module decision, not a programme decision.
Regulation (EU) 2024/3234 pushes the application date for large and medium operators to 30 December 2025, with micro and small enterprises following later. Further simplification has been debated since — confirm the current date at EUR-Lex before quoting it to a supplier.
Tens of thousands of companies disclose on climate through CDP each year; the forests responder population remains a small fraction of that, even among companies with obvious commodity exposure. Which is precisely why an early, honest forests response differentiates a supplier instead of merely keeping pace.
Trainer’s note — verify before you publish. Response counts, member numbers and procurement-spend figures change every cycle, and the EUDR timetable has moved more than once. Take every number in this deck back to the primary source in the reference list and date-stamp it in the slide footer. A brief that cites a stale figure loses the room faster than one that cites none.
The question was never carbon versus water versus forests. It is: which of CDP’s modules does our supply chain trip the threshold on? Run the identical scoring worksheet across these.
Durable and single-use polymer in product and packaging, by weight and by fate. Score this high if packaging is a top-five material line or if we sell into an EPR regime.
Commitments, dependencies and impact assessment at site and sourcing level. The natural bridge between a water answer and a forests answer — and the on-ramp to TNFD and SBTN.
Not a theme but a scored dimension: how many suppliers we ask, what we ask, what we do with the answer. Improves every theme’s score at once — the highest-leverage work in the programme.
Primary sources only. Open each one when you build the internal deck, confirm the live publication or amendment date, and cite it on the slide — the same evidence standard we ask of our suppliers.