The Language of Greenwashing: SDG Omission and Opportunity‐Oriented Environmental Tone as Alert Metrics in Green Bond Disclosures

Green bonds play a central role in sustainable finance, yet concerns about greenwashing raise questions about the credibility of issuers’ sustainability disclosures. Using dictionary-based methods and domain-specific BERT transformer models, this paper proposes two greenwashing alert metrics and investigates their performance by analyzing sustainability reports of European corpo- rate green bond issuers from 2019 to 2023. First, we develop the SDGs Omission Index (SDGOI), which measures the discrepancy between Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) declared ex-ante in green bond frameworks and those subsequently reported in sustainability disclosures. We show that the use of SDG-specific language is associated with broader SDG coverage, whereas generic environmental language is not. Second, we introduce the Environmental Sentiment Metric (ESM), capturing opportunity-oriented environmental sentiment. We find that a more opportunity-oriented tone is positively related to SDG omission, ESG controver- sies, and greenwashing accusations. Together, SDGOI and ESM provide interpretable, disclosure-based indicators that can support issuing greenwashing alerts in the European green bond market.