Three questionnaires, one corporate response
Since 2024 CDP has consolidated its three historical disclosures into a single corporate questionnaire with modular sections. In practice, however, Climate Change, Water Security, and Forests still operate as distinct programmes with their own scoring, methodologies, and audiences. Understanding what differentiates them, and where they overlap, is the first step to deciding which modules apply to your business and how to plan data collection efficiently.
At Dcycle we routinely see companies that should be answering all three but only complete Climate Change. Either they assume Water and Forests are optional, or the data feels intimidating. Both views cost ground in customer reviews and investor benchmarks.
Climate Change: the most universal module
The Climate Change questionnaire is by far the most widely used. Around 80 percent of CDP respondents complete it, and most supply chain requests start here. It covers four blocks:
- Emissions inventory: Scope 1, Scope 2 (location and market based), and Scope 3 across the 15 GHG Protocol categories. Verified data is rewarded; spend based estimates without traceability are penalised.
- Risks and opportunities: physical risk (heat, flood, drought), transition risk (carbon price, regulation, technology), and opportunities, with financial impact assessment.
- Targets and transition plan: Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi) validation is the most common pathway to top scoring. A credible transition plan with capex, milestones, and governance is required for the A list.
- Governance: who owns climate at the board, incentives linked to climate KPIs, and integration with risk management.
Most companies should expect a Climate Change request before they see Water or Forests, because investor and customer pressure has matured fastest on emissions.
Water Security: critical for industries with physical operations
The Water Security questionnaire is mandatory in practice for any business with significant water dependency: food and beverage, pharma, textiles, mining, semiconductors, agriculture, and utilities. It also applies to operations in water stressed regions, which today includes most of southern Spain, southern Italy, and parts of central Europe.
The questionnaire structures around four pillars:
- Withdrawal, consumption, and discharge by source (surface water, groundwater, third party, seawater) and by site, distinguishing freshwater from non freshwater.
- Water risk assessment, ideally using basin level tools such as WRI Aqueduct or WWF Water Risk Filter.
- Water related targets with clear scope, baseline, and timeframe.
- Engagement with the value chain, including suppliers and local stakeholders.
The most common pitfall is reporting only municipal supply numbers and ignoring groundwater abstraction or process water. CDP scoring penalises incomplete boundaries even more than imperfect numbers.
Forests: focused but unforgiving
The Forests questionnaire targets companies exposed to seven commodities historically linked to deforestation: timber, palm oil, soy, cattle products, rubber, cocoa, and coffee. If your supply chain touches any of these, even indirectly through ingredients or packaging, you need to respond.
It scores how well you can answer two deceptively simple questions: where does this commodity come from, and is it deforestation free? Reaching A level requires:
- Volumes by commodity and by sourcing geography, ideally to municipality or jurisdiction level.
- Certification coverage (RSPO, FSC, RTRS) with chain of custody, not just procurement claims.
- Traceability to the production unit for at least the highest risk commodities.
- A no deforestation, no peat, no exploitation (NDPE) policy with a cutoff date and verification mechanism.
Forests also intersects directly with the new EU Deforestation Regulation (EUDR), which makes deforestation free traceability a legal requirement for placing covered commodities on the EU market. Companies preparing for EUDR often discover their CDP Forests response improves automatically.
Where the three overlap
Despite distinct topics, the three modules share roughly 30 to 40 percent of their content:
- Governance is identical across modules. Board oversight, executive responsibility, and climate competence questions are reusable.
- Risk management process, scenario analysis, and integration with enterprise risk are asked in similar form.
- Targets architecture follows the same logic: scope, baseline, base year, target year, and progress.
- Engagement with the value chain uses the same supplier engagement framework, just applied to different topics.
This is why a unified data and governance backbone delivers compounding returns. Companies that build a single emissions inventory, a single materiality assessment, and a single supplier engagement programme can populate Climate, Water, and Forests with significantly less marginal effort than running three parallel exercises.
Choosing what to disclose first
If you cannot do all three at once, sequence them by exposure and pressure:
- Climate Change if you have any customer or investor request, or if you operate in any energy intensive sector.
- Water Security if you operate in food, beverage, pharma, semiconductors, textiles, mining, agriculture, or in any water stressed basin.
- Forests if you handle any of the seven covered commodities, or if you are subject to EUDR.
A common Dcycle recommendation is to start Climate in year one, add Water in year two, and bring Forests in year three. This phased approach keeps the data team sustainable and gives the organisation time to build supplier engagement programmes that feed all three.
Practical data architecture
The companies that score well across all three modules share a common data architecture:
- One canonical data layer for energy, fuel, water withdrawal, and commodity volumes, ingested from operational systems, not retyped from PDFs.
- One emission factor library that aligns with GHG Protocol, AR6 GWPs, and DEFRA or local authoritative sources.
- One supplier portal that collects emissions, water, and commodity origin data through a single onboarding flow.
- One evidence repository linking each answer to verifiable source documents, ready for the audit trail that scorers and assurance providers expect.
Dcycle is built around this architecture because the alternative, three siloed teams responding to three siloed questionnaires, is what keeps companies stuck at C and B levels regardless of how good their environmental performance actually is.
Final thought
CDP Climate, Water, and Forests should not be treated as three separate projects. They are three views of the same underlying reality: how a company uses natural resources and how it is positioned for a transition that is already underway. If you would like to see how Dcycle helps companies disclose across all three modules from a single source of truth, request a demo.