Evaluating TCFD Reporting: A New Application of Zero-Shot Analysis to Climate-Related Financial Disclosures

TL;DR

This paper applies zero-shot text classification to analyze climate-related disclosures in bank reports, revealing growth and gaps in TCFD compliance without additional model training.

Contribution

It introduces a novel zero-shot analysis method with fine-grained TCFD labels for classifying climate disclosures.

Findings

Disclosures increased after TCFD recommendations

Reporting varies by disclosure topic

Some TCFD recommendations remain underreported

Abstract

We examine climate-related disclosures in a large sample of reports published by banks that officially endorsed the recommendations of the Task Force for Climate-related Financial Disclosures (TCFD). In doing so, we introduce a new application of the zero-shot text classification. By developing a set of fine-grained TCFD labels, we show that zero-shot analysis is a useful tool for classifying climate-related disclosures without further model training. Overall, our findings indicate that corporate climate-related disclosures grew dynamically after the launch of the TCFD recommendations. However, there are marked differences in the extent of reporting by recommended disclosure topic, suggesting that some recommendations have not yet been fully met. Our findings yield important conclusions for the design of climate-related disclosure frameworks.