CDP’s Climate Change 2020 Pre-Release Questionnaire is now available on Measurabl!
The official survey will be available starting April 13th, 2020. This guide will review CDP’s Climate Change 2020 Reporting Guidance of the survey, including the CDP 2020 timeline, changes to the survey, and the addition of the Real Estate (RE) sector questions.
**Note that these updates are subject to change.
CDP 2020 Survey Timeline
December 2019: 2020 questionnaire and preliminary version of reporting guidance is released
January 2020: CDP 2019 scores released
April 13th, 2020: CDP 2020 Survey is live in Measurabl
August 14th, 2020: Measurabl survey submission deadline
August 26th: Final submission day for CDP
You may access the full CDP Climate Change 2020 Questionnaire Timeline here. We’ll release the survey in Measurabl shortly after CDP opens the assessment portal (April 13th).
We recommend that individuals reporting still review these changes themselves prior to reporting. The full list of changes can be found here, this includes all of the sector questions. Here you will find Measurabl’s review of the CDP Climate Change 2020 Questionnaire including the addition of the Real Estate-specific questions. Feel free to reach out or comment below if you have any questions regarding the changes to the CDP Climate Change 2020 Questionnaire.
Measurabl’s CDP Survey Module
As the world’s leading ESG data management software for commercial real estate, Measurabl facilitates your CDP filing by efficiently disclosing your sustainability and carbon data to CDP's climate change questionnaire.
Measurabl currently supports the Climate Change questionnaire as well as the Real Estate specific sector questions (new in 2020). With our adaptive survey, helpful in-app guidance references, and example open text responses, you will have an intuitive and constructive experience while filing your CDP response!
High-level Changes
Overall, the CDP 2020 Climate Change survey will see minor changes to questions such as, merging of 2019 questions, changes to verbiage, addition of columns in tables, or modification to scoring methodology/guidance. About 80% of the questions have seen no change or minor change, there are four new questions, and nineteen questions have been modified, these changes were made to help streamline the filing process. This will be discussed in greater detail within documents linked throughout this article.
The biggest change to the CDP Climate Change 2020 Questionnaire is the addition of the Real Estate-specific questions. The real estate sector covers multiple levels of operations (finance, design, construction, lifecycle management) and disclosing CO2 emissions that come from the built environment are now needed more than ever. Currently, buildings are responsible for 39% of the global GHG emissions, and to ensure the alignment with the Paris Agreement goals, CDP has released the real estate sector . “The sizable part of these emissions is attributable not only to the use of built assets – operational emissions (Scopes 1 and 2), but also to their construction – embodied emissions (Scope 3).” (CDP 2020 Guidance)
The main focus of Real Estate sector questions will be:
- Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) of a building
- Embodied carbon emissions - the carbon footprint of the materials used to construct the building, including emissions released throughout the supply chain (cradle to gate or cradle to site).
- Net Zero buildings - if the reporting entity builds and operates ‘net zero’ buildings
- Investments for Research and development (R&D) with regards to low carbon products and services.
Refresher of the CDP Climate Change Questionnaire
The 2020 Climate Change Questionnaire including the Real Estate Sector questions is made up of 14 modules that essentially partition the quantitative and qualitative portions of the survey:
- C0 - Introduction
- C1 - Governance
- C2 - Risks & Opportunities
- C3 - Business Strategy
- C4 - Targets and performance
- C5 - Emissions methodology
- C6 - Emissions data
- C7 - Emission Breakdown
- C8 - Energy
- C9 - Additional metrics
- C10 - Verification
- C11 - Carbon pricing
- C12 - Engagement
- C15 - Signoff
To learn more on what each section is about please check out Measurabl's Detailed Review of CDP Climate Change 2020 changes.
To learn more on how Measurabl will support you with your CDP filing, please check this support article out!
CDP Climate Change 2020 Questionnaire Scoring Methodology