Advancing Sustainability: Seidenberg Professor’s Global Efforts in Biodiversity Reporting

The Seidenberg School’s very own professor, Dr. Namchul Shin, recently traveled to two prestigious academic events in Seoul, South Korea, where he presented his research on sustainability reporting in the coal mining industry. The two conferences, held at Seoul National University and Yonsei University respectively, provided platforms for Professor Shin to share insights into how technology can enhance corporate accountability for biodiversity conservation.

At the KrAIS Summer Workshop conference at Seoul National University and a seminar at Yonsei University, Professor Shin presented his work titled "Assessing Biodiversity Reporting in the Coal Mining Industry: Leveraging Large Language Models." The workshop was sponsored by the Korean Management Information Society (KMIS), KrAIS (the Korean Chapter of the Association for Information Systems), and Seoul National University's Business School, and brought together leading experts to discuss advancements in information systems and their application to global challenges.

Highlighting the importance of his research, Professor Shin noted that even though “the UN called on all UN member nations to tackle biodiversity loss, biodiversity continues to decrease. Businesses significantly impact biodiversity, and they are expected to be accountable for their actions. Through this research, we are investigating how transparently coal mining companies address biodiversity issues in their sustainability reports, considering that they are some of the biggest contributors to biodiversity loss.” Professor Shin and his team of collaborators are using cutting-edge tools like large language models (LLMs), and are validating the results with human experts in the field.

The study was inspired by his sabbatical collaboration at Technische Universität Dresden (TUD) in Germany, and it combines natural language processing (NLP) techniques with expert validation to automate the analysis of ESG (environmental, social, and governance) reports. Professor Shin shared that “a PhD student at TUD asked if NLP could help automate content analysis, and that conversation sparked my interest in applying LLMs to make the process more efficient, especially since I was already teaching NLP techniques at Pace.” He further added that “our experiments with GPT-4o are showing promising results in automating comprehension and analysis.”

Professor Shin’s findings are part of a broader initiative to investigate how industries, particularly coal mining, can align with global biodiversity conservation goals. Although still in progress, the research underscores the potential of how artificial intelligence, paired with human experience, can enhance transparency and accountability in corporate sustainability practices. This project also exemplifies Seidenberg and Pace’s emphasis on interdisciplinary collaboration, bringing together computing, environmental science, and corporate ethics to leverage technology for global sustainability challenges.