Assessing contributions to the UN Sustainable Development Goals through the European Sustainability Reporting Standards: comprehensive mapping and digital integration

This article explores the role of the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive 2022/2464 (CSRD) and the European Sustainability Reporting Standards (ESRS) in enabling contributions toward the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs). The objective is to present and test a mapping tool for assessing corporate contributions to the SDGs, based on the European Sustainability Reporting Standards (ESRS). By selecting the quantitative datapoint indicators from the ESRS, we create a point-by-point triple-way matching (ESRS → GRI → SDG) between the ESRS, GRI and SDGs. Moreover, we include the EU Taxonomy indicators (Regulation 852/2020) into this mapping. A Microsoft Access application was developed as a practical mapping instrument to assess corporate contributions to the SDGs, automate the connections between ESRS indicators and SDGs, and improve the transparency and comparability of sustainability reporting. This tool was tested for a sample of 20 large European companies, from different sectors. The results show that the companies’ disclosures follow the pattern of the ESRS datapoints contributions to the SDGs: SDGs 8, 12, and 13 dominate indicators and disclosures, while SDGs 2, 4, 11, and 17 remain underrepresented. The original contribution is a database of ESRS data points and EU Taxonomy ratios linked to each SDG and clarifying the contributions to sustainable development. We show how each ESRS standard contributes to SDG reporting, and which are the disclosure gaps that need to be addressed by the standard-setter EFRAG.