How Triodos Food Transition Europe Fund made a difference in 2020
The ocean, which regulates climate and supports vital ecosystem services, is crucial to our Earth system and livelihoods. Yet, it is threatened by anthropogenic pressures and climate change. A healthy ocean that supports a sustainable ocean economy requires adequate financing vehicles that generate, invest, align, and account for financial capital to achieve sustained ocean health and governance. However, the current finance gap is large; we identify key barriers to financing a sustainable ocean economy and suggest how to mitigate them, to incentivize the kind of public and private investments needed for topnotch science and management in support of a sustainable ocean economy.
Workers in apparel supply chains are among the hardest hit by the Covid-19 pandemic. Even before the pandemic, workers had to survive on poverty wages; in the first three months of the pandemic alone, workers lost at least US$3 billion in income. Poverty, discrimination, a lack of labor protections, and restrictions on movement form the breeding ground for exploitation and forced labor risks— and the Covid-19 pandemic has dramatically worsened these factors. Workers’ already meager livelihoods were taken away and many lack the support of social and labor protections, which do not extend to (undocumented) migrant workers.
On 1 February 2021, Myanmar’s military staged a coup in a brutal attempt to reimpose
military rule, nullifying the results of the November 2020 elections, arresting and detaining democratically elected members of parliament and declaring a state of emergency.
Over 820 civilians have been killed and thousands detained since the coup. Attacks against
ethnic communities have intensified, including indiscriminate airstrikes. Gross human
rights violations have become widespread and systematic, amounting to crimes against
humanity.
A ranking of 70 of the world’s largest
insurers’ approaches to responsible
investment and underwriting
This report compares millions of proxy voting records from January 2015 to June 2020 to commercial relationships, which uncovers the fact that all major fund managers considered — BlackRock, State Street, T. Rowe Price, and Vanguard — vote with management of their customers at a significantly higher rate compared to non-customers. Proxy voting biases favoring clients occurred at all four asset managers on management resolutions and occurred at three of the four asset managers; environmental, social, and governance (ESG) resolutions; and climate-related resolutions. The bottom line is that proxy voting by major asset managers favors their clients — a clear conflict of interest. More stringent reporting requirements and new technological and policy solutions should be implemented to remove proxy voting conflicts of interest and allow shareholder interests, as intended, to be the primary driver of proxy voting.
Welcome to the second e-newsletter of Responsible Company, the recently launched membership site for ESG content and events tailored to companies, a brand of Responsible Investor.What Responsible Company does:Member companies can publish their sustainability information to investors worldwide via Responsible Investor.We publish subject-based Smart Papers every month designed to outline and problem-solve ESG issues for you: saving you time and resourcesWe bring together the best corporate, investor, service provider and stakeholder speakers on practical webinars to discuss best practice responses to these ESG/sustainability subjectsCheck out Responsible Company’s Events and Content Calendar of forthcoming specialist company-focused ESG webinars and Smart Papers.
Over the past five years, PMI has made monumental progress in achieving its purpose of delivering a smoke-free future by replacing cigarettes with smoke-free products to the benefit of adults who would otherwise continue to smoke. Its 2020 Integrated Report communicates how the fundamental transformation of PMI’s business, governance, performance and ambitious targets create value for its shareholders and stakeholders in the short, medium and long-term. The company continues to progress toward its mission to accelerate the end of smoking with aims to make its smoke-free products available in 100 markets in 2025, up from more than 60 today. Additionally, it has increased its ambition of the contribution of its smoke-free products to total net revenues of more than 50 percent by 2025, meaning that in five years, cigarettes account for less than half of PMI’s total net revenues. Further accelerating PMI’s transformation, PMI announced a new ambition this year of at least USD 1 billion in annual net revenues from ‘beyond nicotine’ products in 2025. Find out how PMI is progressing toward accelerating the end of smoking and download the report.Find out more
The Role of Natural Climate Solutions in Corporate Climate Commitments: A Brief for Investors is a first-of-its-kind engagement tool for investors to spur meaningful dialogue with companies on the role and use of natural climate solutions in delivering on those commitments. It provides clear guidance on how to facilitate engagements with portfolio companies and lays out expectations for climate disclosures—calling for transparency in critical steps along the way to net zero.
In this full-length PDF version of an RI Long Read article, Duncan Austin argues that the need for net zero reveals there have been two interpretations of sustainability all along.Four decades after sustainability first emerged as a concept, we are witnessing a critical ‘net zero moment’. First gradually, and now suddenly, companies are making ‘net zero’ pledges to reduce carbon emissions in line with the Paris Agreement. This represents a substantial and welcome upgrade of ambition regarding climate change, but poses the obvious challenge. In March 2021, a survey by Standard Chartered found that 64 percent of senior corporate executives do not believe that net zero commitments are commercially viable, contradicting the longstanding ESG narrative that ecological sustainability is a ‘win-win’ – good for profit and planet.Download the PDF to read the article.