Better reporting drives sharp rise in companies’ emissions

Companies’ carbon emissions rose by over 500% between 2014 and 2023, finds new research by the University of Cologne. Yet the study, conducted by a research team including Professor Maximilian A Müller and Lucas Keil of the University of Cologne, investigated over 10 years of corporate sustainability reports and found that this sharp rise is driven largely by companies disclosing more, not polluting more.

Using AI data systems to extract information from corporate reports, the researchers tracked over 500 environmental, social, and governance indicators (ESG) across 600 publicly listed companies across Europe, creating almost three million indicator level observations. The openly accessible dataset reveals the underlying trends in corporate sustainability efforts.