This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Companies are increasingly expected to explain the climate risks and how they are responding. CDP, formerly the Carbon Disclosure Project, is a nonprofit that collects and scores corporate environmental disclosures, including emissions data, climate risks and governance practices.
How has CDP's average score changed year by year, and does that trend capture the progress of companies that have disclosed consistently for many years? Kyushu University researchers analyzed a decade of CDP climate scores and found that gains among the firms assessed in both 2016 and 2025 were much greater than the overall average suggested. Expanding coverage brought in lower-scoring newcomers, obscuring those gains.
Published in Corporate Social Responsibility and Environmental Management on Oct. 14, 2026, the research offers investors, companies and rating providers a clearer way to track changes in climate disclosure quality and interpret broader trends as reporting expands. "Founded in 2000, CDP has built an extensive record of corporate climate disclosure," says associate professor Alexander Ryota Keeley of Kyushu University's Faculty of Engineering. "While average scores give us a broad picture of reporting trends, the companies being assessed change over time, which can mask progress within individual companies." To uncover these hidden changes, Keeley's team analyzed 10 years of CDP climate scores for 8,959 companies, covering 37,450 firm-year observations between 2016 and 2025.
By linking company records across years, they separated score changes among "stayers," assessed in both 2016 and 2025, from the effects of "entrants," assessed in 2025 but not in 2016, and "exiters," assessed in 2016 but not in 2025. After converting CDP's eight grades, from D− to A, into a numerical scale of 1 to 8, the researchers found that the overall mean score rose by 0.42 points, from 5.04 to 5.46. Yet the 1,470 stayers gained 1.12 points, with the mean increasing from 5.24 to 6.36—nearly three times the overall increase.
The changing mix of companies explains the gap. Entrants scored below stayers in 2025, reducing the overall increase by 0.90 points. Exiters also scored below stayers in 2016, so their absence in 2025 contributed a positive 0.20 points.
Together, these changes offset 0.70 points of the improvement, masking much of the progress among the stayers. "The findings suggest that sustained reporting, supported by strong governance and reliable data systems, may help companies improve their disclosures over time," adds Keeley. Beyond score trends, the team examined how the content of companies' written responses related to their scores in 2024–2025.
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