Doing Nothing Is a Decision. It's Just a Bad One.

Inaction has a price tag

In a lot of mid-market companies, there is a quiet assumption that sustainability can wait. Some customers are asking, but not all of them, and not every year. The politics are noisy and budgets are tight. Holding still feels like the low-risk option.

It isn't. Doing nothing is a decision, and it has consequences: lost bids, rushed responses when a key account finally insists, and a widening gap between you and the competitors who started earlier. The strongest evidence that sustainability and disclosure carry real value is not an argument. It is what thousands of small and mid-sized companies are already doing with their own limited resources.

Eleven thousand small companies have already decided

CDP's new analysis, From preparation to progress: SME Disclosure Data Insights 2026, covers almost 11,000 small and medium-sized enterprises that disclosed through its dedicated SME questionnaire in 2025. More than 95% of them have made progress on at least one key environmental indicator, and close to 40% meet most or all of the basic indicators CDP assessed. Those indicators span governance, processes for identifying environmental risks and opportunities, stakeholder engagement, GHG emissions disclosure, targets and transition planning.

Most of these companies sit below any mandatory reporting threshold. CDP built the SME questionnaire because smaller businesses were facing growing demands from customers and capital markets, and these companies chose to answer. If there were no value in sustainability and disclosure, 11,000 resource-constrained businesses would not be spending their time and money on it.

The analysis is candid about where the work stops short. Only 20% of these SMEs have an emissions reduction target, 32% have reduction initiatives underway, and just 15% have a transition plan in place today. But 63% either have a transition plan or expect to have one within two years. The foundations are going in now, and the action is following close behind.

Your peers are moving faster than you think

Two details in CDP's data should get the attention of any mid-market manufacturer. First, manufacturing and materials SMEs are among the strongest performers against CDP's basic indicators. These are companies selling into the same brand customers you are, and many of them are building exactly the governance, data and risk processes that procurement teams now look for.

Second, geography matters. SMEs in Spain, France and Sweden lead, helped by a European market that increasingly expects standardized voluntary disclosure from smaller companies through frameworks like VSME. SMEs in the United States and Singapore show the least progress, with most meeting few or none of the indicators. For a US supplier, that cuts both ways. If you are waiting, you have plenty of company. But your customers buy globally, and when L'Oréal or Unilever compares suppliers, the European ingredient maker with a complete disclosure and a transition plan underway is the benchmark you are measured against.

Don't expect your customers to fund the work. Most brands expect suppliers to build these capabilities themselves, and the payoff comes in a different currency: staying on the approved list, winning the next RFQ, and being the supplier a customer can count on when its own targets come due. The suppliers already disclosing are the ones collecting that payoff.

What standing still actually costs

For a mid-market supplier, the cost of inaction rarely arrives as one dramatic event. It shows up as a questionnaire you cannot answer, an EcoVadis score that drops you below a customer's threshold, a CDP supply chain request that goes unanswered while a competitor responds, or a new program from a key account that assumes you already have a GHG inventory. Each one is small. Together they decide who stays on the approved supplier list and who gets considered for new business.

The cost also compounds. As the 63% of SMEs planning transition plans follow through, the baseline rises for everyone. What counts as a strong supplier response today becomes table stakes within a couple of years, and catching up from zero under a customer deadline costs far more than building steadily now.

This is where disclosure earns its keep. The governance, risk processes and emissions data CDP measures are the same building blocks your customers rely on to judge your progress. Disclosure is how the operational work you are already doing becomes visible, credible and comparable to the buyer making the sourcing decision.

Start with the foundations

The SMEs in CDP's data did not start with net-zero pledges. They started with governance, a first emissions inventory and an honest look at their risks, then built from there. That path is open to any mid-market supplier, and the sooner it starts, the less it costs.