CDP for SMEs and Mid-Sized Companies: Challenges, Benefits and Level of Requirements

This guide helps you understand why CDP increasingly concerns SMEs and mid-sized companies, what it involves in practical terms, and how to prepare without mobilising disproportionate resources.

What is CDP and why should SMEs and mid-sized companies care?

The CDP (Carbon Disclosure Project) is an international non-profit organisation that provides a global system for disclosure and assessment of environmental performance. Its questionnaire covers several topics: climate change, water, deforestation, and, depending on the case, biodiversity and plastic waste.

Its role is twofold:

• to provide investors and buyers with comparable information on companies’ environmental risks and maturity;
• to offer organisations a structured framework to measure, manage, and formalise their approach.

For SMEs and mid-sized companies, engaging with CDP is often triggered by a very concrete reality: a request from a client, partner, or buyer. CDP then becomes a credibility passport within value chains where environmental transparency is increasingly expected.

The concrete benefits of CDP for SMEs and mid-sized companies

1. Meeting customer expectations and securing access to tenders

For many SMEs and mid-sized companies, CDP is becoming an implicit or explicit prerequisite in commercial relationships with large corporations: supply chain integration, supplier assessments, international tenders.

A structured CDP disclosure allows you to:

• respond more quickly to customers’ ESG requests,
• strengthen the credibility of your value chain,
• reduce the risk of exclusion from tenders due to a lack of transparency.

2. Easier access to sustainable finance

A strong CDP score reflects proactive management of climate risks and the ability to handle environmental data. This can strengthen trust among:

• impact investors,
• banks and financial partners,
• stakeholders that link financing to ESG criteria.

3. Reduced regulatory risk

By structuring your environmental data in line with recognised standards, you anticipate requirements such as CSRD, the EU taxonomy, and related frameworks (including ESRS E1, E3 and E5).

The CDP process helps to:

• identify data gaps,
• formalise expected policies,
• build stronger governance and KPI monitoring.

4. Image, differentiation and credibility

Responding to CDP sends a clear signal: your company takes environmental issues seriously and follows a structured approach. This is a strong differentiation lever for:

• customers and prospects,
• industrial partners,
• employees (attractiveness and engagement).

CDP level of requirements and methodology

A progressive model… but demanding in terms of methodology

CDP follows a maturity-based logic. Each level requires meeting the expectations of the previous one.

Key point for SMEs and mid-sized companies: CDP is declarative. What is assessed is the quality, consistency and level of formalisation of the answers, more than the volume of supporting documents provided.

How can SMEs and mid-sized companies engage with limited resources?

Even without a dedicated ESG team, there are practical levers to make the exercise manageable.

• SME format: CDP offers a shorter questionnaire for SMEs and mid-sized companies, focused on the essentials, with around 80 questions.
• Anticipation: starting early is the best time-saver (data collection, consolidation, validation).
• Minimum viable centralisation: bringing policies, KPIs, action plans and methodologies together in one place avoids time-consuming back-and-forth.
• Quality control: since CDP does not verify data, an internal (or external) review before submission is critical.
• Targeted support: some companies opt for focused support (methodology, scoring, review, structuring) rather than full-scale consulting.

How to improve your CDP score: priorities and best practices

Key steps for progression

1. Impact, Risk and Opportunity (IRO) analysis
2. Strategy and targets (quantified, time-bound, consistent)
3. Monitoring the right indicators (reliable, traceable, comparable)
4. Formalising policies and governance
5. A prioritised and managed action plan
6. Clear, consistent and complete answers
7. Results analysis to prepare the next cycle

Best practices

• align with recognised methodologies (e.g. GHG Protocol, SBTi);
• avoid generic answers: CDP rewards precision;
• ensure consistency across sections (targets, actions, governance, KPIs);
• organise a cross-functional internal validation before submission.

Integrating CDP into a broader ESG strategy

CDP is not just a reporting exercise: it is a structuring framework that can strengthen ESG maturity.

• Consistency: CDP can serve as an environmental backbone, particularly for climate, water and forests.
• Reusability: data, targets and governance can feed other requirements (customers, audits, CSRD).
• “Maturity effect”: the exercise forces clarification of responsibilities, indicators, methodology and action plans.

CDP for SMEs and Mid-Sized Companies – Key takeaways