An introduction to Carbon Disclosure Project

In 2000, the Carbon Disclosure Project was launched by an UK based organization to disclose greenhouse gas emissions by the organizations. CDP is a key to accelerate the climate change mitigation initiative by providing quantitative information about the green house gas emissions.

It is difficult for businesses to disclose their sensitive information through the barriers of internal policies, investment priorities and top management attitude. Investors, stakeholders, political leaders and big corporations can collectively trigger this initiative and make the requirement for disclosure process more credible.  CDP uses these fundamentals to initiate the process. Presently CDP works with the support of 551 top investors worldwide holding 71 trillion USD of assets under management.

CDP operates globally and around 3000 organizations have started working towards measuring and disclosing their GHG emissions in more than 50 countries. Data collected under this program is made publicly available and can be used by investors, policy makers and stakeholders.  Measuring organization’s GHG emissions helps to better manage it and to identify the risk and opportunities associate with it.

Presently there are five programs under the Carbon Disclosure Project

1.      Investor CDP: Request by the institutional investors to be used by financial decision makers in their investment

2.      CDP Public Procurement: Enables national and local governments to ascertain the impact of climate change in their supply chains.

3.      CDP Water Disclosure: Water-related data from the world’s largest corporations

4.      CDP Supply Chain: Encourage suppliers to measure and disclose climate change information.

5.      CDP Cities: Climate risks and opportunities and adaptation plans for cities around the world.

Climate change is a buzz word in today’s life. Everybody is using it to show their concern towards the climate change but very less plan to mitigate it. International legislation are there in some extent but not uniform and mandatory. Poor implementation of legal framework might be a reason for disappearing concrete mitigation plans. IPCC concluded in its report that growing concentration of green house gases like carbon dioxide resulting in additional warming of the earth’s atmosphere. Growing human population and subsequently higher exploitation of natural resources creates the real time problems in mitigation programs. For preventing the growth of anthropogenic GHG emissions globally; we need tangible plans and true mode of implementation.  CDP provides robust platform to collect the sensitive information about the climate change and allows us to make plans to mitigate it.