Automated Analysis of Sustainability Reports: Using Large Language Models for the Extraction and Prediction of EU Taxonomy-Compliant KPIs

Abstract

The manual, resource-intensive process of complying with the EU Taxonomy presents a significant challenge for companies. While Large Language Models (LLMs) offer a path to automation, research is hindered by a lack of public benchmark datasets. To address this gap, we introduce a novel, structured dataset from 190 corporate reports, containing ground-truth economic activities and quantitative Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). We use this dataset to conduct the first systematic evaluation of LLMs on the core compliance workflow. Our results reveal a clear performance gap between qualitative and quantitative tasks. LLMs show moderate success in the qualitative task of identifying economic activities, with a multi-step agentic framework modestly enhancing precision. Conversely, the models comprehensively fail at the quantitative task of predicting financial KPIs in a zero-shot setting. We also discover a paradox, where concise metadata often yields superior performance to full, unstructured reports, and find that model confidence scores are poorly calibrated. We conclude that while LLMs are not ready for full automation, they can serve as powerful assistive tools for human experts. Our dataset provides a public benchmark for future research.