Stewardship Report 2023: Accelerating positive change

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.

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.

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.

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.

“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.”