CDP Adds Ocean Category to Global Disclosure System Covering 22,000 Companies

CDP has expanded its environmental disclosure system to incorporate ocean data, enabling the more than 22,000 companies that reported through the platform in 2025 to provide information on their exposure to ocean-related risks, dependencies, impacts and opportunities beginning with the 2026 disclosure cycle opening this month. The addition of oceans as a standalone category joins climate, forests, water security, biodiversity and plastics in CDP's disclosure framework, responding to a recognised gap in the data available to investors and decision-makers seeking to understand how companies interact with and depend on ocean health. New questions will cover target setting, supply chain engagement and board-level oversight on ocean issues, embedding accountability structures alongside the new data collection.

 

The Data Gap the Ocean Category Addresses

 

Oliver Tanqueray, CDP Head of Ocean, said the ocean is fundamental to both planetary and economic health yet decision-makers still lack consistent data on ocean-related impacts and risks. He said CDP's introduction of ocean disclosure is designed to close that gap, noting that better data enables better decisions for companies, investors and the ocean itself. The absence of standardised, comparable ocean disclosure has limited investors' ability to assess exposure to ocean-related financial risks including supply chain dependencies on marine fisheries, coastal asset vulnerability to sea level rise and storm surge, regulatory risks from marine environmental legislation and reputational exposure from ocean pollution.

The CDP ocean category arrives as the broader nature and biodiversity finance agenda is accelerating, with the TNFD framework embedding ocean and marine ecosystem considerations into nature-related financial disclosures and the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework setting targets for marine protected areas and ocean health. Corporate engagement with ocean risks and opportunities has historically been less developed than climate disclosure even for companies with significant marine sector exposure, making the CDP category a meaningful catalyst for mainstreaming ocean considerations into corporate environmental reporting. The 2026 disclosure cycle's inclusion of ocean questions signals to companies across marine-exposed sectors that investor expectations on ocean transparency are expanding alongside those for climate and water.

 

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Alignment with Emerging Ocean Finance Frameworks

 

The CDP ocean expansion provides a scalable standardised data collection mechanism at precisely the moment when ocean-related sustainable finance instruments are beginning to emerge at meaningful scale. Ecobank's recent launch of the world's first ICMA commercial bank Nature Bond demonstrated that institutional investors are prepared to commit capital to ocean and nature-linked instruments when the underlying data governance and impact verification frameworks are credible. CDP's ocean disclosure data has the potential to provide the corporate-level transparency that buyers of such instruments, blue bond frameworks and Article 6 marine carbon credit mechanisms need to assess the ocean-related credentials of their counterparties and investee companies.

The alignment between CDP's new ocean questions on target setting, supply chain engagement and board-level oversight and the governance expectations embedded in the TNFD framework creates a connected data ecosystem where corporate disclosures through CDP can inform TNFD-aligned nature reporting and vice versa. Companies with significant ocean dependencies across sectors including fisheries, aquaculture, shipping, coastal tourism and offshore energy will find that the CDP ocean disclosure questions provide a structured framework for assessing and communicating risks and opportunities that may previously have been managed informally or not at all. This structured disclosure can improve internal governance around ocean issues alongside serving external reporting purposes.

 

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Outlook for Ocean Disclosure and Marine Finance

 

Whether companies engage substantively with the new ocean questions or treat them as peripheral will depend primarily on investor follow-through in using the disclosed data in engagement, voting and capital allocation decisions. CDP disclosures derive their commercial relevance from the extent to which institutional investors embed them in their analytical and stewardship processes, and the ocean category will need to demonstrate that engagement pathway to achieve meaningful adoption beyond companies with the most obvious marine exposure. Sustained adoption and high-quality disclosure would establish CDP's ocean category as a foundational data source for the emerging ocean economy finance sector, complementing TNFD-aligned nature reporting and supporting the growth of marine biodiversity finance globally.

The introduction of the ocean category also creates a baseline dataset that will become increasingly valuable over time as the 2026 cycle establishes initial disclosure coverage and subsequent years allow progress tracking against targets. CDP's track record in building comparable, time-series environmental data across climate, water and forests provides confidence that the ocean category can achieve similar depth and utility if companies and investors engage with it seriously. The next few years will determine whether ocean disclosure follows the trajectory of CDP's established categories to become a mainstream expectation for companies with material ocean dependencies.