Governance matters: welcome to our first quarterly Sustainable Investment Review for 2026
We're pleased to present this latest edition of Storebrand AM’s quarterly Sustainable Investment Review (SIR), for the first quarter of 2026. During the quarter, our company engagement activities have been focused on our priority areas: climate transition, nature and biodiversity, human rights, and corporate governance. A great deal of our engagement activities continues to be conducted through collaborative investor initiatives. Strategic use of escalation, through shareholder proposals, including joint filings on AI governance, user privacy, and data rights, has been another important factor.
In Q1 we also became a core participant in the newly launched Deforestation Investor Group (DIG), which has evolved from the Finance Sector Deforestation Action (FSDA), an initiative launched in 2021 that brought together over 30 financial institutions committed to eliminating agricultural commodity-driven deforestation from their portfolios. For investors to address deforestation at scale, broader participation and more consistent implementation are needed, issues which the DIG aims to address.
During the quarter, we completed reassessments of previously excluded companies, resulting in the re-inclusion of Volkswagen and Porsche, following remediation and governance improvements, as well as of Dyno Nobel which ceased the activities that had led to exclusion.
With the geopolitical landscape continuing to be marked by steadily increasing turmoil and conflict, during Q1 we updated our Sustainability Policies, to reflect regulatory developments and clarifications to existing practice, including sanctions-related criteria.
Voting has been in focus, as we move into AGM season. Across our holdings, we exercised our voting rights across a broad range of proposals, with focus on board accountability, executive remuneration, and key environmental and social issues. This included our supporting a shareholder proposal on increased lobbying transparency, at Volvo’s AGM. In this report, we provide more updates on our voting activity, and an early view on developments so far during AGM season, including Storebrand AM's decision to vote against the re-election of BP's board of directors.
Proxy voting is however only one aspect of governance: in this edition of the SIR, we dedicate a special section to examining the state of corporate governance and how it can be reinforced, from the investor perspective. Insights in the focus section include a deep dive into regulatory developments and the state of shareholder democracy by our corporate governance analyst Erik Högberg: a portfolio manager's perspective on corporate governance in our interview of Hans Thrane Nielsen; and InfluenceMap's Founder/Executive Director Dylan Tanner sheds light on the hidden corporate influence shaping climate policy and what investors can do about it.
All this, and more, including data on our engagement and voting activity, is available to explore in this issue: Storebrand Sustainable Investment Review Q1 2026. We hope you will find it informative and engaging.