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I Disagree

29-04-2024 · Insight

Stewardship Report 2023: Accelerating positive change

It’s been a busy year for advocating sustainable investing in the face of many headwinds. The steps taken to continue combatting climate change, along with spreading our knowledge on SI, are among the highlights of Robeco’s Stewardship Report detailing the progress made in 2023.

Read the full report here


    Authors

  • Mark van der Kroft - Chief Investment Officer

    Mark van der Kroft

    Chief Investment Officer

Summary

  1. Focus on our key priorities climate change, biodiversity and human rights

  2. SI Open Access available on our corporate website

  3. Full report on Active Ownership and related SI activities

Our three key SI priorities – climate change, biodiversity and human rights – once again took center stage in our engagement and investing efforts. For climate, we took further steps to execute on our Net Zero Roadmap and strengthen our climate engagement program, with the aim of helping to accelerate the transition in the broader economy.

We continued our involvement in the Climate Action 100+ group, and Robeco was also a founding signatory of the new collaborative engagement program Nature Action 100, highlighting one of the steps we took forward in developing our Biodiversity roadmap. We progressed in identifying and managing the biodiversity-related risks we are exposed to and capitalizing on the opportunities.

Targeting nature loss

With the experts from Robeco’s biodiversity partner, the World Wide Fund for Nature Netherlands (WWF-NL), we finalized the design of our Biodiversity investment framework, which is focused on assessing companies’ impact on nature loss. This framework will be used in our investment processes throughout 2024.

In addition to engaging on biodiversity, we also introduced a deforestation proxy voting policy targeting companies with high exposure to deforestation risk and inadequate procedures to reduce their impact. The policy also targets companies that have been involved in repeated severe deforestation-linked controversies.

Work on human rights

Protecting human rights also remains an important issue in our engagements and voting. In 2023, we started two new social engagement themes. The first focuses on modern slavery in global supply chains, and the second centers around the Just Transition in emerging markets to ensure the environmental move away from fossil fuels does not socioeconomically disadvantage the affected communities.

Expansion of SI Open Access

The year also saw the expansion of Robeco’s Sustainable Investing Open Access initiative, most notably by making our proprietary data in our SDG framework available on our website to broader stakeholders. This was a next step in our SI Open Access journey, after the initial launch in 2022 to make this SI IP available to clients and academics. Our SDG framework assesses the contribution that companies can make to one or more of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals, attributing a score to more than 10,000 firms on the database. The Country Sustainability Ranking, which assesses the ESG characteristics of 150 countries was also added to the platform in 2023.

The importance of stewardship

“In times of geopolitical and economic uncertainty, shareholder advocacy continues to be important,” says Carola van Lamoen, Head of Sustainable Investing.
“We are pleased with the stewardship progress made in 2023, and we are committed to encourage companies to build a more sustainable future for both business and society also in 2024 and beyond. As we move through the new year, we reflect on the promises made by companies and governments toward safeguarding our planet, and evaluate on our contribution in moving toward a more sustainable future.”

Read the full report here


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Important information: This website is prepared and issued in Australia by Robeco Hong Kong Limited (ARBN 156 512 659) (‘Robeco’) which is exempt from the requirement to hold an Australian financial services licence under the Corporations Act 2001 (Cth) pursuant to ASIC Class Order 03/1103. Robeco is regulated by the Securities and Futures Commission under the laws of Hong Kong and those laws may differ from Australian laws. The information on this web page is provided to you because Robeco reasonably believes that you are a "wholesale client" within the meaning of that term under section 761G(4) of the Corporations Act 2001 (Cth) ("Corporations Act") and not any other class of persons. This information is not an advertisement and is not intended to induce retail clients to acquire Robeco products. Retail clients who are interested in Robeco products should contact their financial adviser.