Permaculture or greenwashing? This business school professor uses AI to gate corporate actions

As sustainability awareness rises, the media is flooded with messages from companies about proactively taking sustainable action—how to tackle climate change, how to reduce waste, how to increase recycling rates, and more. It is certainly worthy of recognition that more companies attach importance to sustainability, but at the same time as positive reports increase, whether companies are “greenwashing” – exaggerating, misleading or even falsifying the real environmental benefits of their products and services in order to attract environmentally conscious investors and companies. Consumers – the wave of doubts followed. How to confirm that the sustainable actions claimed by the company are true? University College Dublin has developed an algorithm as a solution. Andreas Hoepner, a professor at the University College Dublin Business School, said: “‘Sustainability’ is a very broad term. If no one checks, companies can speak freely and fabricate stories, which may deviate from the core value of sustainability.” Hoepner formed a team called ” GreenWatch “, which uses AI artificial intelligence to monitor the voice channels of 700 companies, including websites, media, and more. Next, they checked to see if the company’s carbon emissions had been reduced by 7% a year after making a sustainability claim to reach its Net Zero target by 2050. According to GreenWatch survey results, up to 95% of the companies they monitor are suspected of greenwashing their sustainability statements; 80% of companies in industrial and consumer discretionary industries may exaggerate their green actions; In the energy industry, less than half of the company’s sustainability practices are exaggerated or falsified. In terms of regions, 84% of Japanese companies’ sustainability claims may be suspected of greenwashing, followed by 75% of US companies. GreenWatch isn’t the only unit using AI to monitor corporate greenwashing behavior. The University of Zurich in Switzerland and the University of Erlangen in Germany both use a model called “ClimateBert” to analyze companies’ “Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures (Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures,” for short). TCFD)” to confirm whether the company only discloses information that is beneficial to itself. The TCFD Working Group was established by the International Financial Stability Board (FSB) in 2015 to provide companies with voluntary climate-related financial information disclosure recommendations, which have been adopted by domestic and foreign companies and government units. The results of a collaborative study by the University of Zurich and the University of Nuremberg claim that to be substantially good for the environment, voluntary unit reporting should be abandoned in favor of more credible regulatory reporting.