Corporate Emissions Reporting Statistics (2026)

CDP reports that more than 23,100 organisations disclosed in 2025, of which more than 22,100 were businesses accounting for close to two-thirds of global market capitalisation. For large listed companies, non-disclosure is now the exception.

That changes what an emissions statistic is good for. 'Do they report?' has stopped being a differentiator; 'what is in the report, and can it be verified?' has become the whole question.

In 2025, 640 investors holding US$127 trillion in assets asked CDP to collect data on their behalf, and more than 270 major buyers requested disclosure from around 45,000 suppliers.

The composition of that demand explains the pattern of what gets reported. Investor requests pull operational emissions and governance; buyer requests pull product- and site-level data from firms that often have no sustainability function at all.

The ~45,000 supplier requests are the frontier of this dataset. Suppliers are smaller, less resourced and more likely to submit estimates or partial responses, and a buyer's Scope 3 total is assembled from exactly those responses.

So the reasonable expectation for 2026 is rising response rates alongside persistent uncertainty in the numbers those responses feed. Any Scope 3 figure should be read with its estimation method attached.

CDP's 2025 A List, announced in January 2026, recognised over 800 companies across climate, forests and water security — a small fraction of the 22,100+ that disclosed.

That ratio is the most useful quality statistic available here. It shows that the distribution of disclosure quality is heavily skewed, with a long tail of responses that meet the request without being decision-grade.

Scope 1 and 2 figures are relatively comparable between companies. Scope 3 is not: boundaries, categories included and estimation methods differ enough that two similar businesses can report totals that differ by multiples without either misreporting.

When comparing disclosures, check which of the fifteen Scope 3 categories are included and whether the figure is spend-based or activity-based. A company that adds a category can appear to grow its emissions while actually improving its reporting.

Much disclosed data carries limited assurance or none. A precise-looking total with no assurance statement is a weaker input than a rounder figure with reasonable assurance, and regulation is steadily pushing towards the latter.

Read the assurance note before the emissions total. It tells you how much weight the figure can carry in a supplier decision or an investor conversation.

As method and boundaries improve, prior-year figures get restated. That is a sign of maturing reporting rather than of error, but it makes year-on-year trend claims fragile if the baseline moved.

Any trend statement should name the baseline year and say whether it has been restated. Without that, a reported reduction may be entirely a change in accounting.