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Key Takeaways

• "Sustainable funds’ assets under management (AUM) reached a record $4.13 trillion at the end of December 2025, up 4.0% from June, but their share of total global fund assets declined to 6.5%, as traditional funds saw stronger flows.
• Sustainable funds recorded net outflows of $86.4 billion in 2H 2025, more than offsetting inflows earlier in the year. Europe-domiciled sustainable funds recorded outflows for the first time, although much of this was driven by reallocations to bespoke mandates.
• Sustainable funds delivered median returns of 5.3% in 2H 2025, just below traditional funds at 5.5%. Sustainable funds outperformed in most regions, but differences in geographic exposure offset this overall."

… contains …

• Do you need to be radical to be heard?
• The absence of shareholder engagement: A strategic and financial risk?
• Engagement strategy 2025
• Narrative and quantitative report on engagement

Integrated report (financial + ESG), published in 2026 for FY2025.

Publication date: 3 March 2026

Contains:

• "Electrification is unstoppable"
• Iberdrola today
• Business model and strategy
• Human and social capital
• Ethics, transparency and good governance
• Nature and efficient use of resources
• Supply Chain

Integrated-style disclosure (financial + ESG), typical for APAC; includes emissions intensity, LNG exposure, and transition positioning.

… contains:

• Sustainability Report (voluntary)
• Sustainability Report (mandatory)
• Corporate Governance

SASB-aligned with operational ESG metrics (safety, emissions, governance).

Publication date: 20 March 2026

... covers:

• Governance
• Environment
• Social

Flagship climate/ESG update aligned with CSRD; includes detailed Scope 1–3 progress and transition strategy execution.

Publication date: 26 March 2026

"These results underscore once again the robustness of the Company’s integrated multi‑energy model and confirm the relevance of a strategy designed to combine growth in the energy supply, competitiveness, and emissions reduction."

The artificial intelligence (AI) boom is at the forefront of one of the most transformational periods in modern history. However, the rise of AI comes with an increasing demand for water to cool the energy-intensive data centers that power AI computations. As the water withdrawal required to quench global AI demand is expected to reach up to 6.6 billion cubic meters in 2027, and the UN predicts that nearly half of the world’s population will face the risk of serious water scarcity by 2040, many investors are paying closer attention to the sustainability risks associated with rising data center demand. 

This report highlights the key water risk trends associated with artificial intelligence usage, and assesses how companies in the Software & Services industry are currently managing their water risks. It also provides a case study on the Big 4 data center companies – Amazon, Google, Meta, and Microsoft – assessing their relative performance as the market leaders in AI investment.

Markets respond differently to risk. So does portfolio performance.

Portfolio resilience, return potential, and purpose‑aligned priorities are not mutually exclusive.

Our latest research examines how different regions price risk, how investors can evaluate trade‑offs between resilience, returns, and sustainability, and how these dynamics shape portfolio construction with lasting performance implications.

Building on our 2025 analysis, we study stress‑tested US and EU equity market data across multiple major market shocks to demonstrate how portfolios perform under pressure—and why outcomes differ by market structure and regulatory environment.

Download the report to see how these risk signals can be applied across regions to strengthen portfolio resilience in any market.

As the energy transition reshapes markets, investors are seeking clearer ways to assess how transition risks and opportunities may affect portfolio outcomes. In this paper we analyzed more than 37,000 mutual funds and ETFs globally to examine whether transition characteristics were linked to financial performance.  

The results suggest they were. Between 2022 and 2025, higher fund Energy Transition Scores were associated with stronger returns, particularly among climate- and transition-focused funds.

A one-point increase was associated with +1.7% per year higher returns, rising to nearly +3% for climate and transition funds. Managing exposure to transition pressures — such as policy and technology risks — showed the strongest relationship with performance, while transition readiness was more closely tied to improved decarbonization outcomes.

Not all sustainability investments carry equal weight for corporate performance. For executives making the internal case, our analysis offers a clear takeaway: Companies that strongly managed their most financially material sustainability risks tended, over a 12-year study period, to run more stable and predictable businesses than peers that did not.

The finding draws on data from more than 13,500 companies. Controlling for size, sector and region, those in the top quintile of MSCI ESG Ratings showed consistently lower variability in both sales and cash flows than bottom-quintile peers — a difference significant at the 99% confidence level. The pattern held across 10 of 11 sectors, suggesting a structural rather than incidental relationship. 

The results are consistent with the logic underpinning MSCI’s ESG Ratings model, which identifies environmental and social risks that are industry-specific and financially material, rather than treating sustainability as a uniform set of obligations. A chemicals company, for example, faces a different risk profile from a retailer or a bank. 

In this episode

For years, biodiversity risk has been a blind spot for investors — difficult to measure and even harder to link to financial performance. But that’s starting to change. In this episode, we explore how more granular, location-based data is helping investors see where companies are truly exposed to nature-related risks. 

"Stewardship at Dimensional is a global effort to protect and enhance shareholder value through engagements, proxy voting, and advocacy. The Annual Stewardship Report details these initiatives.

... contains:

• Approach to Investment Stewardship
• Investment Stewardship Activities
• Voting and Engagement Case Studies
• Public Policy
• Appendix: Portfolio Companies Engaged in 2025

"As the use of artificial intelligence (AI) has grown over the past few years, so have the energy needs of the data centers that power AI. In 2024, US data centers used approximately 200 terawatt-hours of electricity, about what it takes to power the country of Thailand for a year. And in 2025, greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in the US increased by 2.4%, driven in part by the expansion of data centers for AI and the increased combustion of coal to keep up with the growth in electricity demand.

What does this mean for the carbon footprint of companies involved in AI? We sat down with Michael Gillenwater, the executive director, dean, and co-founder of the Greenhouse Gas Management Institute and a member of Dimensional’s network of ESG researchers and academics, to better understand the challenges of carbon accounting and the implications of widespread adoption of AI on companies’ carbon footprints.

In Part 1 of this two-part series, Gillenwater explains the basics of carbon accounting. In Part 2, we explore how the growth in energy usage by AI data centers will be reflected in a company’s carbon footprint."

Part 1

Part 2 

What will it take to price physical risk with confidence?

On November 10, 2025, in Toronto, CPP Investments Insights Institute convened an invitation-only discussion on the challenge of underwriting and pricing climate-related physical risk.

Building on Investing in a Changing World: How public funds are addressing climate-related physical risks, a recent report from the Institute, the event brought together investors, banks, insurers, reinsurers, and data and modelling providers from across Canada’s financial ecosystem.

In this panel discussion, participants compare approaches and surface practical tools currently in use across the market. They explore what “good” looks like in pricing physical risk, and the data, modelling, governance, and disclosure barriers that must be addressed to move the market forward.