Microsoft, Intel, and Juniper Networks all earned A grades for their climate change risk management, according to the Carbon Disclosure Project's (CDP) latest corporate environmental leaders list.

This score means that these companies show a deep understanding of opportunities and risks associated with climate change and are implementing strategies to address those risks, according to the nonprofit. A-List companies must also have verified scope 1 and scope 2 emissions statements and be actively reducing scope 3 emissions.

Other companies that scored an A include Deutsche Telekom, SK Telecom, Salesforce, Tech Mahindra, and Telefónica. Earning this grade is a significant accomplishment considering only 2% of all scored companies made it onto the A List this year.

CDP, which focuses on promoting a sustainability economy, awards scores ranging from A through F based on information companies self-disclose via one of two different questionnaires. Companies that respond to the less in-depth questionnaire can earn at most an A-.

This means CDP's A through F grades are not a definitive evaluation of a company's sustainability prowess. Rather, scores indicate the level of action taken by a company to assess and manage its environmental impacts, as reported by the organizations themselves.

Companies that received an A- include Alphabet, AT&T, Cisco, Equinix, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Lumen Technologies, Nokia, Orange, and T-Mobile.

In an interview with SDxCentral, Cisco's VP of Corporate Social Responsibility and Sustainability Mary de Wysocki identified a few areas in which Cisco plans to improve and hopefully bump up its climate score in 2022.

"We're really working on our ESG governance," de Wysocki said. The vendor plans to develop incentives associated with meeting climate targets for the executive leadership team and Cisco employees more broadly, she explained.

de Wysocki also highlighted the importance of ensuring proper depth and detail of answers on CDP's questionnaire going forward.

B-List companies are taking action to manage their environmental impacts, but they don't meet all the requirements to fall in the leadership tier, according to CDP. ADVA, Akamai, TSMC, Red Hat, Verizon, and VMware received a B.

The next tier down, which CDP calls "awareness" and correlates to a C grade, represents companies that simply disclose and are aware of their environmental impacts but have not taken action to address climate risks apart from initial assessments. CDP gave both Palo Alto Networks and CyrusOne a C.

F5, Splunk, and Xilinix are among the companies that received a D, meaning they successfully disclosed their environmental risks and potential impacts to CDP but did not provide evidence of actions taken to mitigate climate risks. Of the 13,000 reporting companies, 58% earned low scores in the C to D- range.

Because of the self-reporting nature of CDP's evaluation, a climate score of F represents a company's failure to provide sufficient information for evaluation — not necessarily general failure in environmental stewardship. Companies that found themselves at the bottom of the list include Atlassian, CrowdStrike, Datadog, Dish Network, Dynatrace, FireEye, Fortinet, and Twilio.

CDP's environmental leaders list represents rising demand from all directions for corporate transparency on environmental issues. The 13,000 companies that reported environmental data to CDP represent nearly 64% of all global market capital in 2021. And almost 600 investors accounting for $110 trillion in assets requested corporate environmental data from CDP in 2021.

This has led to companies upping their game — and making sure CDP is aware. More than 500 companies improved their grades from a C or below in 2020 to a B in 2021, meaning they've added that next step of climate action atop risk awareness.

"I see that as a real positive that, quite frankly, it's getting more competitive, and that is great for the world," de Wysocki said.

While those numbers show promise of widespread corporate environmental transparency, almost 17,000 companies failed to respond to CDP's questionnaire at investor or client requests.