We’re pleased to share our latest quarterly sustainable investment review for the second quarter of 2024. Here, you can get a closer look at our sustainability efforts, spanning investment, active ownership and exclusions.
More than ever, we’re determined to play our role in the transition: decarbonizing the economy, protecting biodiversity and supporting inclusive growth. As such, we are active on a wide range of areas, all of which are targeted towards helping us achieve our sustainability commitments.
Engagement and voting activities
We have advanced significantly towards our 2025 climate targets, which you can read more about in our latest progress report. On the interconnected topic of deforestation, our Senior Sustainability Analyst Vemund Olsen provides a summary of a deforestation risk exposure screening that we have conducted across our portfolios.
Exercising various aspects of voting rights, such as shareholder resolutions, is increasingly a major escalation tool that we employ if needed in our engagement efforts, and this was especially clear during the so-called “AGM season” of the second quarter. In this report, you can learn more about shareholder resolutions that we have been involved in filing or co-filing, at companies such as Nippon Steel, Amazon.com and Meta Platforms Inc, among others. We have also, for the first year so far, begun voting against company financial statements or against relevant board directors, at companies that we evaluate as scoring poorly on climate and deforestation risk management. This is a practice we will increase in future AGMs seasons, if our engagements on climate issues do not progress.
There has been positive news on a number of engagements, and in this report, we provide short updates on some examples at Yara and Bunge SA. Our engagements remain ongoing on many fronts, such as with companies on aligning climate strategies with the Paris Agreement for scope 1, 2 and 3 emissions; on human rights related to conflict areas, workers’ rights and living wages; and many other bilateral and collaborative activities. We also provide some updates regarding internal developments on further updating our climate targets.
Insights and perspectives
For a peek into our work on directing capital towards sustainable investments, the report features Portfolio Manager Sunniva Bratt Slette’s insights from her site visit to the Construction City project in Oslo. We also have news on our major step to increase our ownership in the Danish infrastructure fund manager AIP Management. This move furthers our commitment to this asset class that is highly relevant to investments in the transition towards sustainable societies.
With the COP16 biodiversity conference coming up soon, our Head of Climate and Environment Emine Isciel offers some views on closing the global biodiversity funding gap. You can also read in this quarter’s report about the newly published Net-Zero Investment Framework (NZIF) 2.0 from the IIGCC. NZIF, the most widely used net-zero guidance by investors, assembles the latest thinking and guidance in a single source, and will undoubtedly continue to play an important role in our net-zero journey to 2030.