Sustainability Insights
Thorsten Sellhorn writes about ten years of sustainability reporting on the Bertelsmann Stiftung’s “Zukunftsstandort Deutschland” blog
- Thorsten Sellhorn
- Sustainability
In a guest article for the Bertelsmann Stiftung’s blog Zukunftsstandort Deutschland, Thorsten Sellhorn discusses our study Assessing Corporate Sustainability with Large Language Models: Evidence from Europe, recently published in Nature Communications.
Together with colleagues from LMU Munich and the University of Cologne, including Maximilian Müller and Victor Wagner, we used a large language model to analyse 2.9 million sustainability indicators from the reports of the 600 largest listed EU companies between 2014 and 2023.
Companies disclosed 52.4 percent more indicators in 2023 than in 2014, and weaker performers have largely caught up. Direct emissions fell and the share of renewable energy nearly doubled.
Companies improve mostly where public and regulatory attention is highest. As Sellhorn puts it: "Disclosures alone do not reduce emissions".
To read the full article (German version only), click the link below:
https://www.zukunftsstandort-deutschland.de/csrd-nachhaltigkeitsberichte-was-zehn-jahre-zeigen-und-was-nicht/