From 0 to 93%: How the World’s Largest Asset Managers Support Climate Change Proposals

Garnet Roach of IR Magazine covers SquareWell’s latest Insight – The Changing Climate on Investor Behavior. As Garnet Roach highlights in her article, SquareWell’s latest Insight looks at the voting practices and engagement approach of the world’s 30 largest asset managers around climate change which finds that although support for proposals on the issue varies hugely, ‘investors are increasingly becoming transparent on climate change’.

Just one of the 30 asset managers in the list supported no shareholder proposals on climate change (SquareWell looked at proposals that came to a vote between 2018 and 2020), with support then rising from 3 percent at the next lowest level up to 93 percent at BNP Paribas Asset Management.

Shareholder proposals have a low success rate, according to SquareWell’s research, ‘but that is expected to change in the near term.’ Of the 162 shareholder proposals filed over the past three years, SquareWell notes that only 15 were approved but adds that BlackRock, the largest asset manager, has said it will be more supportive of climate-related shareholder proposals in 2021. In the research period, BlackRock supported just 11 percent of shareholder proposals on climate change.

The full article can be accessed here.