“Transforming our world: the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development” was agreed upon in 2015 by the global community and proposes 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) for the period between 2015 and 2030. Since the greater integration of goals was an explicit claim, there are numerous overlaps among them. One of the novelties of the SDGs is that, in order to achieve the set goals, the Agenda 2030 addresses not only the states but the businesses as well. In our study, the relationships between the SDGs were analyzed on the base of the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) indicators linked to the goals. The analysis was carried out by cluster analysis. Our results indicate that there is a strong relationship to be found among nine of the 17 SDGs. That relationship is mainly technical, which is caused by the number of aligned (genuine) GRI indicators. Though there are relationships between the SDGs as well, their strength is much weaker. According to our classification of SDGs, we suggest that the gap of business attention among SDGs is smaller than it is showed by KPMG.

The regulatory environment for both sustainability and financial reporting is changing as standardisation and digital reporting (e.g., XBRL) are gaining traction within regulators. The measurement methodology and mandatory information content of disclosures are yet to be decided for corporate CO₂ reporting by EU regulators and standard-setting organisations. In our study, we reviewed the sustainability reports of three leading German automotive groups by revenue for the period 2016–2020 as a case study. The research methodology was carried out with text-mining-aided content analysis to provide a collection of sustainability standards (GRI and SASB) in the evaluation of emissions reporting. As an addition to prior literature, conditions of relevance and clarity regarding published information were introduced in the evaluation process of compliance to CO₂ disclosures. Companies by reporting practice were assigned to different stages of carbon management and actual emissions were evaluated. In the conclusions, discussion of the reliability of reported sustainability information, the applicability of digital reporting is provided through regional perspectives. We found that although analytical methods are available to assess the level of corporate carbon management, their usefulness is limited if the data are not reliable. Significant progress can be expected from analyses using standardised, comparable corporate carbon data.