From CDP disclosure to real supplier reductions

What does a CDP score actually tell you?

A CDP score tells a customer or an investor what you disclose and how well you manage it. It is an input to a reduction plan rather than the plan itself. Emissions come down when you hold supplier-specific data and use it to talk to the organisations behind the spend.

Which part of a CDP response needs the most work?

Scope 3, and inside it the categories that depend on other companies. The GHG Protocol Scope 3 Standard notes that scope 3 emissions are often the largest share of a company's total, and CDP's corporate questionnaire asks you to report scope 3 by category and to describe how you engage your suppliers on climate. That is where a disclosure exercise becomes a supply chain exercise. Purchased goods and services (category 1) and capital goods (category 2) are usually calculated from spend, which is enough to disclose and too coarse to act on.

What holds the reduction work up?

Proxy data and chasing. A spend-based figure tells you which category is large, not which supplier to call, so the next step is a request to the supplier. Those requests go out through spreadsheets, come back partly filled, and every follow-up is manual. The reduction plan waits on the data collection, and the data collection waits on other people's inboxes.

What does the time freed from form filling buy you?

A sequence. Measure the suppliers behind the spend, engage them, then plan and track what the engagement changes. Each step needs the one underneath it, so the order matters more than the length of the list.

1. Supplier engagement at scale. Segment by spend, category or emissions intensity. Send a clear ask with practical support, in line with SBTi supplier engagement guidance. Track the commitments and record what changed.
2. Forecasting and planning. Build trajectories by category, then test how switching materials, energy or transport modes moves your path to target. Prioritise the levers that bring reductions forward.
3. Procurement integration. Put climate performance into sourcing and supplier relationship management, with a scorecard buyers can read, so the expectation reaches suppliers through the people who place the orders.

How does DitchCarbon help a team that already reports to CDP?

DitchCarbon provides verified emissions data for over 2 million organisations, so procurement, sustainability and finance teams can measure and act on supply chain and portfolio emissions from one source. For a CDP reporter, the supplier figures are there before the questionnaire opens, so the engagement work starts on day one.

• Coverage on the suppliers who never reply. Your list is matched by entity resolution against DUNS, LEI and ISIN identifiers, so a figure attaches to the company you actually buy from. Coverage gaps are shown, not hidden. The same layer covers portfolio companies when an investor is the one asking.
• Requests that arrive already filled in. Suppliers confirm or correct a prepopulated profile instead of starting a blank survey, and prepopulated requests get higher response rates than a cold survey. A recent deployment reached about 60% of a large supplier base within 2 weeks.
• Figures an auditor can follow. Every figure carries its source and change history. The DitchCarbon Portal calculator is verified to ISO 14064-3, limited assurance, by UL Solutions, renewed annually, and the emission factor methodology for spend-based Scope 3 categories 1 and 2 was independently assessed by Globus Thenken in August 2025. Both documents download from the trust centre, which is what makes the reporting audit-ready and auditable by a third-party auditor.

Coherent's result: CDP supplier score lifted from C to A- across 15,000 suppliers. Read the Coherent story.

Where should you start?

1. Check CDP's own documentation for this year's questionnaire content, scoring methodology and submission timeline, because those dates govern the reporting work.
2. Take the top 50 suppliers by emissions rather than by spend, and build a 90 day programme around them: one clear ask, practical support and a monthly review.
3. Tie the programme to next year's budget by naming the supplier actions, the capital or operating cost behind each one, and the emissions impact you expect.

If a customer or an investor has already asked you for a CDP response, that work is done and it should count more than once. Upload the response, or an EcoVadis scorecard, through upload your report, and claim your profile so the next request answers itself.

See the coverage on your own supplier list, and get numbers you can defend within 2 weeks.

Last reviewed July 2026.

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