Ecovadis, CDP, UNGC – Overview and Interplay with ESRS

EcoVadis is a company that offers sustainability assessments as part of an online tool for companies worldwide. It assesses the sustainability performance of companies in four main areas: Environment, labor and human rights, ethics and sustainable procurement. Companies must submit relevant documents to support their answers in a questionnaire provided by EcoVadis. These documents may include policies, reports, certificates and other evidence. EcoVadis' assessments based on these documents then help companies to manage their ESG risks and achieve their sustainability goals.  

The integration of EcoVadis into CSRD (Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive) reporting is possible because EcoVadis offers comprehensive sustainability assessments and scorecards that fulfil the requirements of the CSRD. In this respect, EcoVadis plays a supporting role in CSRD reporting to fulfil the requirements of the ESRS (European Sustainability Reporting Standards) by helping companies to record and report the required sustainability information. This also includes compliance with the EU Taxonomy and the Sustainable Finance Disclosure Regulation (SFDR). 

This also reveals the main difference between EcoVadis and the CSRD/ESRS: While the ESRS are specific standards developed within the framework of the CSRD to standardize sustainability reporting in the EU, EcoVadis is an assessment platform that can be used by companies worldwide.

The CDP, formerly known as the Carbon Disclosure Project, is an environmental reporting framework that provides companies with a platform to measure, manage and report environmental data. It rates companies in four categories, from A to D, based on their environmental efforts. Due to the extensive data sets that CDP assembles, it is best known as the ‘gold standard’ of environmental reporting. The voluntary questionnaire, which can be answered by large and small companies, cities, states, regions and other organizations, consists since 2024 of the topics of water use, forest utilization and climate protection, which were previously broken up into three different questionnaires.  

Following the early announcement of cooperation between CDP and EFRAG regarding the convergence of reporting, CDP published a further comprehensive statement on joint interoperability as part of COP29 on 12 November 2024. The CDP's questionnaires are therefore largely consistent with the ESRS E1 standard (climate change). From 2025 onwards, additional efforts are to be made through studies and surveys, for among other things, to benefit extended interoperability. As practical support for users, a mapping is also to be published at the beginning of 2025, which will provide an overview of the data point mapping between CDP and ESRS. An initial mapping has already been published by the UNGC in the meantime. The double materiality perspective, which is reflected in the ESRS, is already covered in the context of CDP reporting. Impacts as well as risks and opportunities are part of the CDP questionnaire. 

Coordination with regard to reporting is a significant lever in terms of digital data efficiency. Around 90% of European market capitalization currently publishes environmental data via the CDP platform. Accordingly, a standardized understanding simplifies reporting immensely because data records only have to be collected once. Hurdles in reporting are thus lowered.

 

The UN Global Compact (UNGC) is a voluntary initiative of the United Nations that encourages companies to adopt sustainable and socially responsible business practices. The UNGC is based on ten principles in the areas of human rights, labor, the environment and anti-corruption.  

The UNGC questionnaire, which members must complete annually, the Communication on Progress (CoP), which has replaced an annual progress report since 2023, focuses on environmental, social and governance issues in accordance with the ten principles and systematically asks questions in these areas, the answers to which can be used to determine the company's development regarding sustainability issues. In contrast to EcoVadis and CDP, companies are not subjected to conventional scoring in this context. However, a strong commitment, which can be derived from the publicly accessible CoP, can be the ticket to UNGC programmes such as the Global Compact LEAD program. 

The UNGC's CoP mapping describes in detail at data point level the extent to which the questions in the CoP correspond to the content of the ESRS. However, there are currently no plans to adapt the UNGC CoP to the ESRS to improve interoperability. Nevertheless, the UNGC offers its members a wide range of information and training on reporting in accordance with ESRS. 

Companies that are members of the UNGC network have therefore generally already implemented initial sustainability practices and strategies in the areas of the ten principles that are directly or indirectly required or queried in the ESRS. In addition, the companies have already dealt with the collection of sustainability-related data and information as part of the progress report. In connection with the ESRS, the UNGC (CoP) therefore primarily plays a supporting role.