EcoVadis, CDP, and Other Requests: What They Mean

Welcome to Teaching Sustainability, the 20-week series from Aclymate created to help small and mid-sized business leaders understand what sustainability means, why it matters, and what to do next. Each week, we cover one practical topic, from carbon accounting and reporting to certifications and climate action, in clear, simple language designed to help you build a more resilient, credible, and competitive business.

Last chapter, we looked at why these requests show up in the first place: supplier questionnaires, RFPs, and procurement standards driven by your customers' own reporting obligations. This chapter opens the envelope. When a request actually lands, what is it, who runs it, and what does a good response look like?

Why the Names Matter

Not every sustainability request is the same shape. Some are broad annual scorecards. Some are narrow, single-topic disclosures. Some are baked directly into a customer's own procurement software. Knowing which kind you're looking at tells you how much effort it takes, how often it recurs, and whether the result is shared with just that one customer or published more widely. Below are the ones small and mid-sized businesses run into most often.

EcoVadis

EcoVadis is a third-party ratings platform. A customer invites you to complete an EcoVadis assessment, you fill out a questionnaire and upload supporting documents, and EcoVadis scores you across four areas: environment, labor and human rights, ethics, and sustainable procurement. The result is a scorecard (bronze, silver, gold, or platinum medal tiers, plus a numeric score) that the requesting customer can see, and that you can also share with other customers who ask.

The environment section is where your emissions data comes in, but it's only one piece of a broader assessment that also covers policies, certifications, and documentation. EcoVadis assessments typically need to be renewed annually or every couple of years, and the questionnaire length scales with company size.

What it means for you: this is usually the most comprehensive of the common requests, and the one most worth investing in once you're likely to receive it repeatedly, since a single completed assessment can often be reused across multiple customers.

CDP (formerly the Carbon Disclosure Project)

CDP is a nonprofit that runs an annual environmental disclosure questionnaire, most commonly for climate, but also for water security and forests. Unlike EcoVadis, which is triggered by an individual customer relationship, CDP disclosure is often requested by investors or by a large customer collecting data across its entire supply chain through CDP's platform. You report your emissions (typically Scope 1, 2, and increasingly Scope 3), your climate risks, and your reduction targets, and CDP scores your response on a letter scale from D to A.

CDP's questionnaire is detailed and assumes a reasonably mature emissions inventory. It's less common for a small business to be asked directly, and more common to receive it as a downstream request from a large customer running a "supply chain" CDP program.

What it means for you: if this lands on your desk, it usually signals that a major customer has a formal, investor-facing climate program, and that your response may be one data point among thousands they're collecting. Precision and consistency matter more here than breadth.

Direct Customer Questionnaires

Not every request comes through a named platform. Many mid-market and enterprise customers maintain their own supplier sustainability questionnaire, sent as a spreadsheet, a form, or a section within a broader supplier onboarding or annual review process. These vary widely in scope, ranging from a handful of yes/no questions about policies to a detailed request for your full emissions inventory.

What it means for you: these are the least standardized and the easiest to underestimate. Because there's no shared platform or public score, they can feel low-stakes, but they still get reviewed by an actual procurement team and can factor into vendor decisions.

RFP Sustainability Sections

When a prospective customer runs a competitive bidding process, environmental criteria increasingly show up as a scored section within the RFP itself rather than as a separate questionnaire. This might ask for your carbon footprint, your reduction targets, relevant certifications, or a narrative description of your sustainability program.

What it means for you: unlike an annual scorecard, this is tied to winning a specific piece of business, often on a deadline that doesn't leave time to build data from scratch. Having a maintained inventory and a short, reusable sustainability summary ready in advance is the difference between a same-day response and a scramble.

Industry and Certification-Linked Requests

Some requests come through a trade association, buying consortium, or certification body rather than a single customer, such as a shared sustainability standard that an entire industry group asks its members to meet. These often overlap with, or explicitly reference, frameworks like the GHG Protocol that we've covered earlier in this series.

What it means for you: the underlying data requirements are usually similar to the requests above, but the response may need to follow a specific format or be submitted through a particular portal defined by the association.

A Quick Comparison

Request Type	Who Asks	Frequency	Scope
EcoVadis	Individual customers	Annual or biennial	Broad: environment, labor, ethics, procurement
CDP	Investors or large customers	Annual	Deep: emissions, climate risk, targets
Direct questionnaire	Individual customers	Varies	Varies widely
RFP section	Prospective customers	Per bid	Usually narrow, deal-specific
Industry/certification	Trade groups or consortia	Varies	Standardized within the group

What to Do This Week

Sort any past or current requests into these categories. If you've received one or more of these, knowing which type it is tells you how to prioritize your response and whether it's worth building a reusable answer.

Build one reusable sustainability summary. A short document covering your emissions inventory approach, your current numbers, and any policies or certifications you hold will answer a large share of what direct questionnaires and RFP sections ask for, without starting from zero each time.

If you've received an EcoVadis or CDP invite, don't ignore it. Both platforms allow you to save a draft and return to it, and a partial, honest response generally scores better than none at all.

How Aclymate Helps

Aclymate keeps your emissions inventory organized and current, so the numbers these frameworks ask for, Scope 1, 2, and 3, activity-based where available and spend-based to fill the gaps, are ready to pull rather than rebuilt under deadline. On the Aclymate One tier, your Carbon Bookkeeper can help you map your existing data directly to the fields EcoVadis, CDP, and common customer questionnaires actually ask for.

The Takeaway

EcoVadis, CDP, direct questionnaires, RFP sections, and industry standards all ask a version of the same underlying question, but they differ in who's asking, how often, and how deep the request goes. Recognizing which one you're looking at, and building a maintained inventory and a reusable summary in advance, turns each new request into a quick, confident response instead of a fire drill.

Next chapter, we bring the series back to the fundamentals: building your first complete emissions inventory and setting your baseline year.