Image created in Midjourney. Prompt: "Using AI to analyze sustainability reporting"

Leveraging citizen science to strengthen responsible business behaviour in the aftermath of the Konzernverantwortungsinitiative

This project leverages the synergies between human and artificial intelligence in a collaborative project to shed light on the reporting behavior of Swiss firms on sustainability-related matters and how these reports fare with regards to the requirements of the newly enacted non-financial reporting obligation. The goal is to encourage higher transparency on sustainable reporting by Swiss companies.

Under the leadership of David Weiss, Prof. Dina Pomeranz, Prof. Dr. Elliott Ash and Dominik Stammbach, the project revolves around a participatory process of citizen scientists. The project team collaborates with citizens, while using state-of-the-art Natural Language Processing techniques to automatically assess sustainability reports by Swiss companies.
As of today, no platform exists in Switzerland which would allow an interested public to investigate such sustainability reports at scale. Through the digital platform businessresponsibility.ch and with the help of citizens, we collect a new dataset on sustainability reports, which will cover reports and documents by at least the 1'000 largest firms in Switzerland. Citizens will be able to upload and assess new sustainability reports issued by Swiss companies.

These reports will be automatically assessed via automated computational analysis and using state-of-the-art language models. The reports will be examined as to whether sustainability reports contain the relevant categories that Swiss companies are required to disclose under the new reporting obligation.

Based on this dataset of sustainability reports generated by citizen scientists, the project aims to conduct a randomized control trial (RCT) that analyzes firms’ responsiveness to citizen monitoring. Overall, the project aims to significantly increase the accessibility of sustainability reporting in Switzerland for the interested public and thus contribute to increased transparency in corporate reporting.

Weiterführende Informationen

The project's platform collects and shares data on sustainability and human rights reporting of the 1'000 largest organisations in Switzerland. Find out which organisations are reporting and which are not.

Are you missing a company that insterests you? Have you found a sustainability report that we should include in our analysis? Then don't hesitate to upload a report or add a new company for analysis.