New engagement themes for 2026 to cover climate and AI

The new climate themes will engage firstly with companies on their physical exposures and adaption readiness for severe weather events, and secondly with governments on their responses to global warming and decarbonization generally. The third theme will tackle the responsible use of AI as it spreads throughout the world, creating trillion-dollar companies in its wake.

Two themes on human rights in conflict areas and protecting biodiversity will also be extended, as wars in Gaza and Ukraine continue, and following the launch of Robeco’s Climate and Nature Transition Plan 2025-2030. All come as the Active Ownership team celebrates its 20th anniversary of using engagement and voting to make investing more sustainable.

“We’re starting an engagement theme on physical resilience, which is the other side of climate change from transition, focusing particularly on sectors that face the largest risks, such as flooding, extreme weather events, water stress, and more,” says Engagement Specialist Alex Mortimer, who will work on the theme with colleague Harry Ashman.

“All companies are in some way dependent on the area where they run their business, but reliable and comparable data on this risk exposure is still in development. We’ll need to use the best-available research to identify which companies are more exposed to physical climate risks without sufficient adaptation planning, and stay up to date on the latest findings.”

“It's worth keeping in mind that even if owned assets aren’t at risk, the supply chains that a business depends on might be. Think of how dependent the agricultural sector is on water availability and proper weather conditions. Even if a food processing plant may be out of harm’s way, it will grind to halt if a company can’t source raw materials due to widespread crop failure.”

“Resilience and adaptation are not an alternative to mitigation,” adds Senior Engagement Specialist Ashman. “However, as society fails to decarbonize quickly enough, we are locking in increasingly frequent and severe impacts from physical hazards, making resilience and adaptation more pressing than ever.”

“We will be building on our previous climate engagement experience to assess the measures that companies are taking to assess and adapt to these risks. Companies will be asked to consider their value chain as well as their own operations, to integrate nature into their approach, and to work with policymakers and local communities to ensure an effective approach. This theme will also assist the ongoing integration of physical risks into our portfolio risk management and investment decision making processes.”

The sovereign engagement will take place with a number of European governments within the Eurozone. The data needed will come from the Assessing Sovereign Climate-related Opportunities and Risks (ASCOR) platform, which assesses how countries are managing the low-carbon transition. This data also underpins bond selection for Robeco’s Climate Euro Government Bond ETF.

“Up until now we have embarked on sovereign engagement about deforestation with Brazil and Indonesia and in Australia and Canada on climate,” says Environmental Engagement Cluster Lead Cristina Cedillo Torres. “So we’re now expanding this program to include European governments on climate.”

“It will be an intensive engagement program that will build on our experience with sovereign engagement of recent years and actively bring our perspective on the critical relevance of robust climate policies within our investment processes.”

Engagement on the responsible use of artificial intelligence with tech software and microchip hardware companies has two aspects.

“The first is energy use, as all these data centers for AI are quite energy hungry, and they’re significantly adding to carbon emissions,” says Social Engagement Cluster Lead Danielle Essink, who is leading the theme with colleague Samuel Radford.

“So we’ll look at the efficiency of energy use, whether they are using renewable power sources, their carbon footprints, and whether these footprints can be offset. That’s on the environmental side.”

“The social side of AI’s impact is also top of mind for our clients, particularly with issues like misinformation and content moderation,” adds Engagement Specialist Radford. “As AI use grows, we need to make sure it is done responsibly, with the right controls in place. Our engagement will look to ensure this is done proactively, not reactively.”

“And it’s not just about focusing on the negatives. We’re still very positive about the technological opportunities that AI provides. There is obviously potential disruption in some business models, but also productivity gains to be made.”

The three new themes will run alongside two evergreen themes on human rights in conflict areas, and on biodiversity. A theme on the need for companies to do their due diligence on operating in, or sourcing from, conflict zones launched in 2022 and was due to end in 2025.

“It is very sad that the number of regional and international conflicts have increased since we started the engagement,” says Essink. “The importance of enhanced human rights due diligence has never been highlighted so prominently, as companies whose own operations or supply chains are connected to conflicts face challenges.”

And with the launch of Robeco’s Climate and Nature Transition Plan 2025-2030 in November, updating the earlier net-zero climate roadmap of 2021, the team will ramp up its nature-related engagement work to tackle companies that have the highest impact on water, hazardous waste and deforestation across portfolios.

“We will extend the coverage of our nature engagements, prioritizing companies with the highest impacts on the drivers of nature loss but failing to manage these risks effectively,” says Senior Engagement Specialist Laura Bosch.

“We’ll leverage Robeco’s Biodiversity Traffic Light scores to further inform our nature engagement work and deliver on the commitments from our Climate and Nature Transition Plan published few months ago.”