Cheap talk and cherry-picking: What ClimateBert has to say on corporate climate risk disclosures

Bingler, Julia Anna; Kraus, Mathias; Leippold, Markus; Webersinke, Nicolas

doi:10.1016/j.frl.2022.102776

Cited by 83 publications

(62 citation statements)

References 11 publications

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“…Some paradigms emanate from the literature suggesting that the TCFD has indeed helped popularize the practice of climate disclosure [ 50 , 51 , 52 ], but other studies tend to think that the Taskforce is not effective enough because it is based on the goodwill of companies and stakeholders [ 53 ]. Disclosures and carbon accounting are one of the first steps towards environmental risk management for the private sector, but they are also vulnerable to cherry picking and greenwashing [ 54 , 55 ]. The limits attributed to Carbon and Climate disclosures will become limitations for nature-risk disclosures as well [ 56 ].…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Original Research: How Will the TNFD Impact the Health Sector’s Nature-Risks Management?

Deweerdt¹,

Caltabiano²,

Dargusch³

2022

IJERPH

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The G20-led TNFD taskforce or TNFD is under development and should be ready in September 2023. With one year to go before its official release, the study of the beta versions of the 0.2 framework is crucial to know the strategy of the taskforce regarding metrics and sectors with high natural risks. Its big sister, the Taskforce on Climate-related Financial Disclosure or TCFD, had defined the health sector as a non-key in terms of climate change and carbon risks, but the TNFD decided that it was a priority in terms of nature-related risks and co-dependencies. This research therefore focuses on the innovations of the TNFD and its impact on future disclosures in the sector. The goal being to predict if the TNFD will lead to more disclosures and therefore better risk management from the health firms. To complete this research, the analysis of the sector’s risks and dependencies on nature-related issues and biodiversity loss was essential. To do so, a policy analysis on the framework of the TNFD was conducted, as well as a literature review on nature related risks and opportunities for the health sector. The Health Sector-Wide Approach (SWAp) was analysed to highlight the Task Force’s focus on the health sector. Finally, a due diligence of the TNFD’s stakeholders and partners was carried out to ascertain the interest and participation of health sector actors in the TNFD. Results have shown that Nature risks were important for the sector and that the TNFD was giving more importance to the sector in terms of priority. On the contrary, the health sector does not show an improved interest in this new taskforce. There is a need for more research in the implementation of Nature-financial metrics for disclosures.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Original Research: How Will the TNFD Impact the Health Sector’s Nature-Risks Management?

Deweerdt¹,

Caltabiano²,

Dargusch³

2022

IJERPH

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“…In the face of the expected growth of disclosure of climate-related risks by TFCD supporting companies, the study concludes that said support is mostly cheap talk as firms cherry pick in order to report primarily non-material climate risk information. They continue this study with a new paper, in which Bingler et al [4] conclude that "institutional ownership, targeted institutional investor engagement, materiality and downside risk disclosures are associated with less cheap talk".…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 90%

“…Thus, they create CliMedBERT, which is based on ClimateBERT and diseaseBERT. The surprising conclusion reached by Bingler et al [4] in their application of ClimateBert to TFCD re-ports is particularly striking. In the face of the expected growth of disclosure of climate-related risks by TFCD supporting companies, the study concludes that said support is mostly cheap talk as firms cherry pick in order to report primarily non-material climate risk information.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 94%

“…Since its publication in October 2021, the pretained transformer model Cli-mateBert has only been applied so far in 6 other papers which have not been published yet (two of which are from ClimateBert's original authors): [17,4,30,7,13,36]. Hershcovich et al [17] analyze ClimateBert only regarding its energy consumption, in a context of awareness about the environmental impact that NLP pretrained models present.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Fine-tuning ClimateBert transformer with ClimaText for the disclosure analysis of climate-related financial risks

Garrido-Merchán¹,

González-Barthe²,

Vaca³

2023

Preprint

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In recent years there has been a growing demand from financial agents, especially from particular and institutional investors, for companies to report on climate-related financial risks. A vast amount of information, in text format, can be expected to be disclosed in the short term by firms in order to identify these types of risks in their financial and non financial reports, particularly in response to the growing regulation that is being passed on the matter. To this end, this paper applies stateof-the-art NLP techniques to achieve the detection of climate change in text corpora. We use transfer learning to fine-tune two transformer models, BERT and ClimateBert -a recently published DistillRoBERTa-based model that has been specifically tailored for climate text classification-. These two algorithms are based on the transformer architecture which enables learning the contextual relationships between words in a text. We carry out the fine-tuning process of both models on the novel "Clima-Text" database, consisting of data collected from Wikipedia, 10K Files Reports and web-based claims. Our text classification model obtained from the ClimateBert fine-tuning process on ClimaText, outperforms the models created with BERT and the current state-of-the-art transformer in this particular problem. Our study is the first one to implement on the ClimaText database the recently published ClimateBert algorithm. Based on our results, it can be said that ClimateBert fine-tuned on Cli-maText is an outstanding tool within the NLP pre-trained transformer models that may and should be used by investors, institutional agents and companies themselves to monitor the disclosure of climate risk in financial reports, as well as in other textual sources, such as policies, new legislation or directives passed on this matter. In addition, our transfer learning methodology is cheap in computational terms, thus allowing any organization to perform it.

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“…greenwashing (e.g. ClimateBERT, Bingler et al, 2022;Webersinke et al, 2022) or by summarizing climate impact evidence across more than 100 000 scientific articles (Callaghan et al, 2021). In the field of materials sciences, Tshitoyan et al (2019) were able to not only reveal the knowledge hidden in thousands of publications on material science properties, but were also able to find new promising thermoelectric compounds 4 years (!)…”

Section: Guidance For Future-proofing Hydrologic Knowledgementioning

confidence: 99%

Lifelines for a drowning science ‐ improving findability and synthesis of hydrologic publications

Stein

Mukkavilli

Wagener

2022

Hydrological Processes

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Cheap talk and cherry-picking: What ClimateBert has to say on corporate climate risk disclosures

Cited by 83 publications

References 11 publications

Original Research: How Will the TNFD Impact the Health Sector’s Nature-Risks Management?

Original Research: How Will the TNFD Impact the Health Sector’s Nature-Risks Management?

Fine-tuning ClimateBert transformer with ClimaText for the disclosure analysis of climate-related financial risks

Lifelines for a drowning science ‐ improving findability and synthesis of hydrologic publications

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