annual review indst 2024 public - Flipbook - Side 30
30
EOS
Governance
Climate and biodiversity
dominate 2024
proxy season
The 2024 vote season was beset by legal disputes as battle lines hardened
between shareholders and fossil fuel companies resistant to change. In a more
positive trend, biodiversity-related proposals made a strong showing.
Shareholders attempting to exercise their rights found
themselves frustrated in the 2024 vote season as some
companies resisted investor proposals. Across Europe,
biodiversity-related resolutions were a growing trend
with a focus on chemicals and pesticides, deforestation,
deep-sea mining, plastics, AMR and animal welfare.
In Asia and some emerging markets, there were signs
of improvement in board gender diversity and
independence, although worrying practices continued
in some areas.
In 2024, we made voting recommendations at 14,701 meetings,
covering 143,075 proposed resolutions. This was up from
12,963 meetings in 2023 and 128,181 proposed resolutions.
Overall, we made at least one voting recommendation against
management at 67% of meetings, versus 65% in 2023. For
North America we recommended voting against management
on 6,040 proposals, or 19%, versus 18% in 2023.
Climate change
In line with investor fiduciary duties, we consider recommending
votes against directors at companies identified as falling
behind peers in managing climate-related opportunities and
risks, using various region and sector-specific climate risk
indicators and team analysis. In 2024, we recommended voting
against the re-election of directors or relevant proposals at
298 companies, due to concerns about insufficient
management of climate-related risks.
In the European market, there was an advisory vote on Shell’s
energy transition and a climate-related shareholder proposal
from Dutch non-profit Follow This. Shell’s recent scaling back
of ambition in its medium-term transition targets, a lack of
comprehensive indicators, and its relative loss of energy
transition leadership led us to recommend voting against the
energy transition report and for the Follow This shareholder
proposal. This asked Shell to align its medium-term emissions
reduction targets with the Paris Agreement.
We also saw a range of climate-related
shareholder proposals at financial
services companies, addressing their
role in financing different carbonintensive sectors.
We also saw a range of climate-related shareholder
proposals at financial services companies, addressing their
role in financing different carbon-intensive sectors. EOS
attended the annual shareholder meetings of Royal Bank
of Canada, Bank of Montreal, Scotiabank, TorontoDominion
Bank and the Bank of Montreal virtually. We wanted to
highlight the fact that according to the Transition Pathway
Initiative’s latest Net Zero Assessment Framework, these
Canadian banks had scored zero points on the alignment
between their net-zero commitments and their lobbying
or trade association activity.
We asked a question related to these activities, querying if the
banks had conducted a review of their trade associations and
lobbying activities to ensure alignment between their own
commitments and Canada’s net zero by 2050 goal. No bank
sufficiently addressed the question, relying on current
disclosures as an answer. However, we see an opportunity to
engage more deeply on this subject given our escalations
during the 2024 proxy season and the importance of
supportive public policies required for the banks to reach
their ambitious climate goals.
