Paper accepted for publication in Nature Communications: Assessing Corporate Sustainability with Large Language Models

The paper “Assessing Corporate Sustainability with Large Language Models: Evidence from Europe,” by Kerstin Forster, Lucas Keil, Victor Wagner, Maximilian A. Müller, Thorsten Sellhorn, and Stefan Feuerriegel has been accepted for publication in Nature Communications. The study is the result of a collaboration between the Institute for Accounting, Auditing and Analysis and the Chair of AI in Management at LMU Munich, together with the University of Cologne.

For the Sustainability Reporting Navigator (SRN), this publication represents more than a successful research project. It marks an important step toward a goal that has motivated the SRN from the beginning: making sustainability information more accessible, comparable, and useful.

Over the last decade, sustainability reporting has expanded considerably. Companies now publish extensive disclosures on environmental, social, and governance (ESG) issues. Yet much of this information remains buried in lengthy PDF reports, making it difficult to compare companies or analyze sustainability performance at scale.

The study explores how recent advances in artificial intelligence can help address this challenge. Using large language models, the authors developed a framework that automatically extracts quantitative ESG indicators from corporate reports. Applied to reports from the 600 largest listed companies in Europe between 2014 and 2023, the framework makes it possible to systematically track sustainability disclosures and performance across 501 ESG indicators.

The findings show that large language models can reliably transform unstructured sustainability reports into structured data, enabling analyses that would be virtually impossible through manual collection alone. They also highlight that changes in reported sustainability performance are often closely linked to changes in disclosure practices, making transparency itself an important part of understanding corporate sustainability.

Read the paper in Nature Communications.

Explore and download the data, code, and framework on the Sustainability Reporting Navigator (SRN).