An analysis of annual reports from the sustainable development goals perspective
Özet
Purpose – The sustainable development goals (SDGs) are introduced to guide achieving the
sustainable goals and tackle the global problems. United Nations members may perform activities
to achieve the predetermined goals and report on their SDG activities. The comprehension and
commitment of several stakeholders are essential for the effective implementation of the SDGs.
Countries encourage their stakeholders to perform and report their activities to meet the SDGs. The
purpose of this study is to investigate the extent to which corporations’ annual reports address the
SDGs to assess and comprehend their level of commitment to, priority of and integration of SDGs
within their reporting structure. This research makes it easier to evaluate corporations’ sustainability
performance and contributions to global sustainability goals by looking at the extent to which they
address the SDGs.
Design/methodology/approach – In the study, it is revealed to what extent the reports meet the SDGs
with the multilabel text classification approach. The SDG classification is carried out by examining the
report with the help of a text analysis tool based on an enhanced version of gradient boosting. The
implementation of a machine learning-based model allowed it to determine which SDGs are associated
with the company’s operations without the requirement for the report’s authors to perform so. Therefore,
instead of reading the texts to seek for ‘‘SDG’’ evidence as typically occurs in the literature, SDG proof
was searched in relevant texts.
Findings – To show the feasibility of the study, the annual reports of the leading companies in Turkey are
examined, and the results are interpreted. The study produced results including insights into the
sustainable practices of businesses, priority SDG selection, benchmarking and business comparison,
gaps and improvement opportunities identification and representation of the SDGs’ importance.
Originality/value – The findings of the analysis of annual reports indicate which SDGs they are
concerned about. A gap in the literature can be noticed in the analysis of annual reports of companies
that fall under a particular framework. In addition, it has sparked the idea of conducting research on a
global scale and in a time series. With the aid of this research, decision-making procedures can be
guided, and advancements toward the SDGs can be achieved.
