CDP essential criteria 2026: the climate change scoring essential criteria, level by level

Last updated August 2026. This is the part of CDP scoring that surprises people after the fact. You can answer thoroughly, score well inside a level, and still be graded a level lower because one specific box was not ticked. CDP publishes the criteria in a separate document from the scoring methodology, and because it is not linked from the main guidance pages most respondents never read it. Below is what the 2026 climate change essential criteria actually require, which level each applies at, and what changed this cycle. If you are assembling the emissions figures that sit behind half of these criteria, that is what our carbon accounting software is built for.

CDP essential criteria are minimum disclosure requirements applied at each scoring level, separate from the points you earn. They establish a consistent reporting baseline: CDP uses them to guarantee that any company scored at Leadership has actually disclosed the data points that make a Leadership claim meaningful. All criteria at a level must be met to progress to the next level.

Each carries an identifier built from EC for essential criteria, CC for climate change, and a number, so EC-CC1, EC-CC3, EC-CC17 and so on. Since 2026 the questions involved are tagged inside the full corporate questionnaire itself, which means you can find them while you are drafting rather than discovering them in your score report in December.

Two limits are worth knowing. Essential criteria apply to your overall score for an environmental issue, and they do not cap or limit your category sub-scores, so your breakdown can look healthy while your letter does not. And they apply only to organizations answering the full corporate questionnaire: the SME corporate questionnaire has no essential criteria at all.

Your final score is capped at the level below. If an Awareness criterion is not met, your score is limited to a D. If the Awareness criteria are met but a Management criterion is not, the score is capped at a C. The same logic carries up through Leadership and the A List, and the cap applies regardless of the percentage you earned at the higher level.

That is the whole trap in one sentence. A company that clears the 70% Leadership threshold but has not verified its Scope 2 figures does not get an A with a note attached. It gets a B, and nothing in the result explains why. The percentage arithmetic that produces the number underneath is covered separately in the CDP scoring methodology for 2026, and what the resulting letters mean is on CDP score.

This is the table most respondents are actually looking for. It covers the criteria that apply to a general organization, meaning all sectors except financial services, which has its own parallel set. Read it as a checklist for the level you are aiming at, remembering that levels are cumulative: to be scored at Leadership you must satisfy the Awareness, Management and Leadership criteria.

Count the rows by level and the shape of CDP scoring becomes obvious. Awareness has two criteria. Management has one, board oversight, carried over from Awareness. Leadership has nine. The A List adds six more on top.

In other words, there is almost nothing standing between a complete response and a C, and a wall standing between a C and an A-. Companies that plateau at B rarely plateau because their answers got worse. They plateau because Leadership is the first level where the criteria demand external evidence: verified numbers, a published response, a real transition plan, incentives that show up in someone's compensation.

Two changes matter, and the first one helps you.

CDP removed EC-CC1 and EC-CC2, the risks and opportunities criteria, from both the Management and Leadership levels. They now apply at Awareness only. CDP made the change after its annual review found the criteria were having an outsized scoring impact on organizations that demonstrated strong environmental stewardship elsewhere in their response, because of how inflexible the risk and opportunity reporting requirement was. If your score was capped at Management in a previous cycle over risk reporting, that specific ceiling is gone.

The second change is about wording rather than substance, and it is the reason this document is worth reading in full this year. CDP restructured the criteria to specify the exact response options you have to select in each question. Where the 2025 text said "the organization has a process in place for identifying, assessing, and managing environmental risks", the 2026 text says "Yes" selected in column "Process in place" in question 2.2.1. The requirement is unchanged. What changed is that guesswork has been removed, and there is no longer any excuse for interpreting a criterion loosely. The question-level scoring changes that landed alongside the criteria rewrite, several of which do move points, are set out on CDP 2026 changes.

Where two question numbers are joined by OR in CDP's tables, either route satisfies the criterion. Where they are joined by AND, both are required. Several criteria also have alternative routes labeled Route A and Route B, which usually exist so that a company the requirement does not apply to can still pass by answering honestly that it does not apply. EC-CC18 is the clearest example: if you do not generate electricity, heat, steam or cooling, selecting "No" is a passing answer.

Four of the thirteen general criteria are inventory work rather than governance work, and they cluster entirely at Leadership and above. These are the ones that cannot be fixed in the last fortnight before the deadline.

The verification thresholds are the item to plan a cycle around. Ninety-five percent coverage of Scope 1 and Scope 2 means an assurance provider has to be able to trace your figures back to source records, and arranging that takes months rather than weeks. It is also the reason a spreadsheet inventory tends to fail its first assurance engagement: the numbers may be right, but the evidence trail from a total back to the underlying bill does not exist. Our approach classifies accounts payable and utility records into a scope-by-scope inventory with every figure tied to the document that produced it, which is the trail a verifier samples. That is the same ground as CDP reporting software.

The A List adds six criteria on top of everything at Leadership, and they are qualitatively different: they ask for evidence of commitment rather than evidence of measurement.

EC-CC11 requires that you engage suppliers on climate change. EC-CC13 requires no relevant exclusions from any scope, unless the exclusion is due to a recent acquisition or merger. EC-CC6 requires a public commitment or position statement aligned with the Paris Agreement, with the statement attached to your response. EC-CC7 requires board-level oversight of the transition plan and a named position responsible for developing or implementing it. EC-CC4 requires climate-linked monetary incentives for board or executive positions, with an explicit exemption where legal restrictions prevent them.

EC-CC25 is the most demanding. An A List near-term target must either be approved as science-based by the Science Based Targets initiative, or independently meet at least a 4.2% absolute annual emissions reduction between the base year end and the target end date for both Scope 1 and Scope 2. That second route is the one companies overlook: SBTi approval is not the only path, but the arithmetic is unforgiving if you take the other one. Around 5% of scored companies made the 2025 A List, 899 of nearly 20,000. Each gate, and the scoring weight behind it, is set out on CDP A List criteria.

Yes, substantially. Financial services organizations are assessed against a parallel set covering the same topics through a portfolio lens: EC-CC2 for risks and opportunities, EC-CC4-FS for incentives, EC-CC5 for client and investee policy frameworks, EC-CC12 for engagement with clients and investees, EC-CC16 for portfolio impact measurement in place of Scope 3 disclosure, EC-CC20 for energy-related activities, and EC-CC28 for portfolio targets.

Several of these route differently depending on which activities you undertake, and life and health insurance underwriters who do no banking, asset management or asset ownership follow a shorter route through EC-CC2 and EC-CC16. Sector-specific criteria also exist outside financial services: low-carbon research and development under EC-CC8 for cement, capital goods, chemicals, metals and mining, steel, construction, real estate, coal, utilities, oil and gas, aviation and transport; capital expenditure breakdowns under EC-CC9 and EC-CC10; feedstock consumption for chemicals and steel; and building lifecycle and net zero criteria for construction and real estate. Aviation is new as a distinct sector in 2026.

You are scored against your primary questionnaire sector only, even where CDP has allocated you as many as four, so the sector-specific criteria that apply to you are narrower than the full list suggests.

Step six catches more companies than it should. Submitting privately is the default instinct for a first-time discloser, and it is an outright bar on Leadership. Whether your score ends up public is a separate question decided by who requested you, which is set out on CDP score. The questionnaire structure the criteria are tagged into is covered on the CDP questionnaire, and the dates you are working against are on the CDP reporting deadline for 2026.