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Briefing11 March 2025
Putting Health Back on the Menu - Investor asks of the out of home sector
The ‘out of home sector’ is increasingly shaping diets across the world. Many companies in the sector notoriously rely on sales of less healthy products, leaving them most exposed to fast-evolving changes in consumer demand and regulatory shifts that aim to improve diets and reduce public health spending. Assessing these risks is essential yet difficult for investors because the sector’s health-related disclosures are poor and inconsistent. Against a backdrop of increasing consensus on health and nutrition reporting, this briefing provides investors with clear engagement asks of out of home companies. Companies must seize this opportunity to protect their long-term value by disclosing the healthiness of their sales, and proactively transitioning to healthier portfolios.
Report18 February 2025
Voting Matters 2024: Are asset managers using their proxy votes for action on environmental and social issues?
We analysed how 70 of the world’s largest asset managers voted on 279 shareholder resolutions aimed at improving companies’ impacts on pressing environmental and social issues during the 2024 proxy voting season. For the first time, we also analysed how asset managers voted on 2,227 management items at 126 companies, such as votes on director re-election. A subset of 148 of items is presented in the ranking table, comprised of votes on management items where a recommendation had been made ahead of the voting season by selected organisations.
Statement21 November 2024
Investor letter challenging food and drink sector to act on public health
Major investors, coordinated by ShareAction, have written to six CEOs of food and beverage manufacturers – including PepsiCo, Coca-Cola and Mondelez – calling on the sector to be more transparent about the healthiness of its sales as a first step towards taking accountability for its significant impact on public health. Most of the investor signatories are part of ShareAction’s Long-Term Investors in People’s Health initiative, which encourages the integration of health as a responsible investment theme to help build healthier, fairer societies.
Report13 November 2024
The costs of low pay - a responsible investment guide on tackling low pay in the UK retail sector
The UK’s biggest retailers have an important role to play in boosting the quality of life of hundreds of thousands of workers to help shape fairer, healthier societies. However, the business model for the UK retail sector is built on poverty pay and insecure contracts. Household names such as Next and JD Sports are failing to provide their workforce with a real Living Wage, leaving millions of workers living in poverty and struggling to afford basics like heating and food. This doesn’t just harm low-paid workers’ quality of life, it harms the economy too by driving inequality, hindering productivity and adding pressure on state resources through increased health and welfare cost, posing a threat to the long-term interests of shareholders. In our briefing, we have published new guidance for investors in the UK retail sector warning them of the long-term financial risks of failing to pay the real Living Wage, and setting out a responsible investment approach to raise standards. We believe in the fair treatment of workers, and this briefing is part of our work with investors to demand that companies change their employment practices to ensure everyone has access to decent work.
Report07 November 2024
SUSTAIN - Why nature-loss is material for your financial institution
The Strengthening Understanding and Strategies of Business to Assess and Integrate Nature (SUSTAIN) project provides businesses, financial institutions, and regulatory bodies with the knowledge and resources to better understand, assess, and monitor the dependencies and impacts on nature from activities across different sectors of the economy. The briefing for investors, highlights the critical need for materiality screening to understand nature-related impacts, dependencies and risks. It is designed for investors just getting started on their journey to address nature-related issues.
Report05 November 2024
Mind the strategy gap: how disjointed climate targets are setting banks up to miss net-zero
Europe’s biggest banks have a vital role to play in financing the transition to a low carbon economy. However, our research has found that the climate targets of Europe’s 20 largest banks are not fit for purpose. Their decarbonisation targets are too narrow, their sustainable finance targets are not rooted in clear, robust methodology, and they are not sufficiently aligned with one another. This means it is unlikely the banks' current climate targets will succeed in shifting enough financing away from fossil fuels toward renewable power, green infrastructure and technologies at the speed and scale we need to prevent a dangerously heated world. In our report, we are urging banks to set climate targets that are ambitious, transparent and coherent. This is vital for banks to show how they plan to shift financing to critical parts of the transition, such as expanding renewable energy and making real estate more energy efficient.
Briefing10 September 2024
Risk Management in Protected Areas
We are losing biodiversity at an unprecedented rate, with the current rate of species extinction estimated at 100 times that in pre-human times. Protected areas are an instrumental conservation tool, with demonstrated impacts on the reduction of species extinction risk and threats to the associated ecosystems and species richness. An internationally recognised area-based conservation mechanism with regulatory support across the globe, protected areas feature prominently in the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF). In cooperation with UNEP-WCMC, this guidance calls for investors to recognise the vital role of protected areas as a tool for biodiversity conservation and take the recommendations above as guidance to strengthen their investment policies, capital allocation and portfolio stewardship processes.
Report17 June 2024
Rise Paper 3 - the need for a new investor blueprint for the fossil fuel sector
To ensure that finance is driving action to tackle social and environmental challenges at the scale and pace we urgently need, ShareAction is urging the investment community to align with its ambitious new definition of responsible investment. We believe that “Responsible investment is a transparent approach, embedded throughout the investment process, that takes the negative and positive impacts on people and planet as seriously as financial risk and return.” ShareAction is supporting the investment community to meet this ambition by releasing a series of guidance papers that will set out Responsible Investment Standards & Expectations (RISE) for asset managers across specific topics. This guidance, grounded in detailed research, recommends actions that asset managers can – and should – take in today’s investment environment in pursuit of being a truly responsible investor. This is the third guidance paper. This is the third guidance paper in the RISE series. In it, we address fossil fuel policies, recommending how asset managers can take a much more purposeful and effective approach to investing in and engaging with the sector.
Report05 June 2024
Effective Fossil Fuel Policies for Asset Managers
The science is clear. To limit global temperature rises, the world must reduce greenhouse gas emissions to reach net-zero. In this paper, we explore the clear environmental basis for transitioning the global economy on a 1.5C pathway and effective fossil fuel policies that asset managers can adopt to limit temperatures to 1.5C.
Briefing03 May 2024
Why shareholders should support the 2024 resolution on scope 3 emission at Yara International
Yara International is Europe's biggest nitrogen fertiliser company, creating as many carbon emissions a year as 16 coal-fired power plants. This briefing sets out why shareholders should support the resolution at Yara International's AGM on 28 May 2024 which asks Yara to set science-based targets to reduce its full climate impact by 2025. Yara International published its AGM notice on 3 May 2024. The notice included the shareholder resolution and the company's response to the resolution and supporting statement. The investor briefing addresses the points made in the company response in the AGM notice in detail. We have also pulled out and addressed the key points in Yara International's response available here.
