Transport is flagged as relevant in 8 of 16 high-impact sectors

The transport categories — category 4 upstream and category 9 downstream — are presented as relevant in 8 of CDP's 16 high-impact sectors.

The two places with a figure attached

Cement — WBCSD guidance recommends that most companies in the sector calculate and report category 9, and in practice 68% of cement companies reported category 9 as "relevant, calculated".

Transportation services — category 4 is the largest at 32% of the sector's Scope 3.

Where it must not be overstated

Food, beverage and tobacco has category 9 second in its summary table. But the same section ends like this — a majority of 2021 respondents reported these categories as "relevant, calculated", yet "neither accounted for a significant proportion of the sector's total emissions".

What dominates that sector is category 1 (reported by 70% of 162 companies, 77% of Scope 3).

So compressing this into "transport is large for shippers" would overstate CDP's own account.

Precisely: transport is presented as a relevant category in half the high-impact sectors, its size differs by sector, and it is largest for the logistics services sector itself.

※ Chemicals, electric utilities, construction and real estate appear in the relevant-category lists but the document gives no individual share for them, so none is reproduced.

This article expands one section of LCS international standards analysis 2, Where CDP Puts Transport. The full report works from the CDP technical note itself (v3.0, 2024-06-28) as its primary source with page numbers given, and does not fill in figures the document does not contain.