Buzz: Transfer to editor

Neuberger Berman has published its 2025 Stewardship & Sustainable Investing Report containing details on the points summarised below:

Key data

• Publication date: No publication date is stated in the report; data is reported as at 31 March 2026, indicating publication in Q2 2026.
• Report type: Stewardship
• Period covered: Full-year 2025
• Frequency: Annual
• Scope: Whole-of-operations (firm-wide, across equities and credit)

Specifics

• Sustainability themes: Active ownership as passive managers retreat from stewardship; climate transition and decarbonisation; index concentration and systemic risk; human capital; governance and executive compensation; responsible use of AI in investment research
• Sectors of focus: Engagement organised by topic rather than sector; the largest engagement topics by volume were climate risk management (2,695) and human capital management (548)
• Companies featured (include): Eli Lilly (access to affordable obesity treatments), Toro Company (compensation and capital allocation), CEMEX (biodiversity programmes and disclosure)

Team update

The report is introduced by Jonathan Bailey, CFA, Global Head of Stewardship and Sustainable Investing, and references the firm's Stewardship and Sustainable Investing Advisory Council (established 2021), which meets quarterly.

Differentiators

Neuberger Berman continues its "NB Votes" advance proxy-vote-disclosure initiative (launched 2020) and explicitly positions its active ownership against large passive managers scaling back stewardship — opposing management in 55% of the 38 votes it disclosed in advance.

Sarasin & Partners has published its 2025 Stewardship Report containing details on the points summarised below:

Key data

• Publication date: No specific publication date is printed in the report
• Report type: Stewardship
• Period covered: Calendar year 2025
• Frequency: Annual (published every year since 2021)
• Scope: Whole-of-operations (AUM £17.2bn as at 31 December 2025)

Contents and focal points

• Section 1: Policy and Context Disclosure
• Section 2: Activities and Outcomes Report
• Principle 3: Engagement (stewardship priorities: Paris alignment; social value chain; nature and circularity)

Specifics

• Sustainability themes: Climate / Paris alignment; social value chain (human and labour rights, DEI, tax); nature and circular economy; responsible technology and ethical AI; and a newly launched 2025 "Security" investment theme
• Sectors of focus: Banks, oil & gas / energy, technology, defence & security, consumer goods - 
• Companies featured (include): HSBC, Equinor, Meta, Alphabet, Unilever

Team update

The foreword is approved by Guy Matthews (Managing Partner) and Natasha Landell-Mills (Head of Stewardship);

The stewardship team also includes Julia Shatikova (Ownership Lead), Luke Horwood (Stewardship Associate) and Sian Jones (Stewardship Analyst).

Differentiators

Sarasin launched a new "Security" thematic in 2025, maintains strong accounting-reform and auditor-oversight advocacy, and reports 73 companies engaged across 763 goal-linked activities; it holds the ICGN Global Stewardship Disclosure Award 2024 and scored 5/5 stars in five of six PRI modules.

Alquity Investment Management has published its Alquity – Impact Report 2026 containing details on the points summarised below:

Key data

• Publication date: 2026-07-07
• Report type: Other (firm-level impact / responsible-investment activity report)
• Period covered: Annual (2025/26 impact year; not explicitly bounded)
• Frequency: Annual
• Scope: Whole-of-operations (impact across Alquity's emerging / high-growth-market strategies)
• Contents and focal points: Alignment of financial returns with social impact - Investing in emerging / high-growth markets - Responsible investing as an investment approach (governance-led ESG integration)

Specifics

• Sustainability themes: Social impact and inclusion, emerging-markets development, governance-led ESG integration
• Sectors of focus: Not specified

Differentiators

• Alquity donates around 10% of its management fees to its Transforming Lives Foundation and frames social impact as inseparable from emerging-market equity performance.

Railpen has published its Stewardship Report 2025: Strengthening member outcomes and market standards, containing details on the points summarised below:

Key data

• Publication date: 2026-06-01
• Report type: Stewardship
• Period covered: 2025 activity year
• Frequency: Annual
• Scope: Whole-of-operations (on behalf of the Railways Pension Scheme Trustee)

Contents and focal points

Climate & Nature - Responsible Technology - Sustainable Financial Markets (and Worth of the Workforce)

Specifics

• Sustainability themes: Climate and nature; AI governance (a new investor framework developed with Chronos Sustainability); corporate governance and unequal (dual-class) voting rights; workforce disclosure and the Living Wage; capital-markets advocacy and shareholder rights
• Sectors of focus: Not specified (cross-sector systems-stewardship approach; investment banks, VC and PE firms targeted on voting-rights engagement)

Team update

The report is fronted by Caroline Escott, Railpen's investment stewardship specialist.

Differentiators

Railpen launched a new "GGIC" coalition of UK pension schemes on good governance, refreshed a "systems stewardship" strategy for 2026–2030, published an AI governance framework for investors, and expanded its ICEV initiative from listed equity into venture capital and private equity.

Green Century Capital Management has published its 2026 Proxy Season Wrap-Up containing details on the points summarised below:

Key data

• Publication date: 2026-05-06
• Report type: Engagement (shareholder-advocacy season report)
• Period covered: 2026 shareholder-advocacy / proxy season (January–June 2026)
• Frequency: Annual (per season), with in-season updates
• Scope: Whole-of-operations (firm-wide shareholder advocacy across the Green Century Funds)
• Fundamental focus: Engagement & stewardship
• Contents and focal points - Address Climate Change - Report on Sustainability Issues - Preventing plastic pollution and preserving nature and biodiversity

Specifics

• Sustainability themes: Climate and carbon emissions, clean energy, plastic pollution, biodiversity/nature, deforestation, sustainability disclosure
• Sectors of focus: Consumer/retail, apparel, food & beverage, logistics/transport, semiconductors, telecoms, insurance
• Companies featured (include): Columbia Sportswear, ArcBest, AutoNation, NVIDIA, Coca-Cola

Team update

The wrap-up is authored by Annie Sanders, Director of Shareholder Advocacy.

Differentiators

Green Century filed around 30 shareholder proposals and engaged 66 companies in 2026 while noting many peer investors pulled back amid the political climate; it is the only US mutual-fund company wholly owned by environmental and public-health non-profits.

Researchers Thomas Dulak and Jean-Yves Gnabo (University of Namur / Universite Libre de Bruxelles) have published a working paper, Lifecycle Selection and Liquidation in Sustainable Mutual Funds, examining whether sustainable funds differ from conventional funds in their likelihood of liquidation, using European UCITS equity fund data from 2019 to 2025.

They find no robust difference in liquidation risk once observable fund characteristics are controlled for, but among otherwise similar funds matched on category, size and age, sustainable funds are significantly more likely to be liquidated - an effect concentrated in the early stages of the fund lifecycle that fades as funds mature.

They find no evidence that ESG signals (the Morningstar ESG Risk Rating and SFDR classification) affect liquidation risk within sustainable funds, concluding the pattern points to stronger early-stage product selection rather than systematically higher liquidation risk.

Describes why modern slavery and human-rights risks persist despite Australia's Modern Slavery Act and what investors and fund managers can do to drive change beyond compliance.

The discussion focuses on identifying human-rights risks early in the investment process and the practical steps active managers can take through research and engagement.

Morningstar Sustainalytics has published a research report, Expanding ESG Transparency in Private Markets, examining ESG risk in private markets through the Morningstar PitchBook Unicorn 30 Index and Sustainalytics Controversy Ratings.

It argues that ESG risks in private markets are often under-reported and that low controversy severity may mask emerging exposures, with AI-focused unicorn companies facing concentrated risks in intellectual property, data privacy, and quality and safety.

With many large, late-stage private companies expected to enter public markets in 2026, the report contends that extending ESG frameworks into private markets and standardising data could help investors anticipate pre-IPO downside risk and improve cross-market comparison, due diligence and portfolio risk monitoring.

An ESG Policy Assessment Report of Five Banks in Ghana

The report benchmarks the sustainability policies of five Ghanaian banks against the Fair Finance Guide International methodology.

The assessment scores the banks' publicly disclosed commitments across core themes such as climate change, human rights, labour rights, corruption, transparency and gender, applying the same policy-scoring framework the Fair Finance network uses in other markets.

It is intended to give Ghanaian civil society, customers and the banks themselves a transparent baseline for strengthening environmental and social standards in the sector.

Examines the ESG and geopolitical risks that increasingly accompany cross-border licensing deals between Western drugmakers and Chinese biotech firms.

As patents expire and R&D costs and pricing pressures mount, the report argues these partnerships are reshaping how companies build and diversify their pipelines while bringing new risks in product governance, patient safety, clinical-trial oversight and data transparency.

Traces which financial institutions in the Netherlands finance companies importing liquefied natural gas from the United States.

Finds that:

• ING was the largest lender, providing around USD 37 billion to companies in the LNG sector between 2017 and 2025, while
• Allianz was the largest investor at about USD 6.6 billion, with
• Dutch financial institutions channelling over USD 60 billion into the sector since 2017.

The research notes that 619 tankers carried some 39 million tonnes of US LNG to the Netherlands between May 2017 and end-2025 - more than five years of Dutch household gas use - even as many Dutch banks, insurers and pension funds scale back fossil-fuel involvement.

WBCSD has published its Business Breakthrough Barometer 2026, an annual pulse check on how leading businesses are responding to climate risks, opportunities and market shifts, drawing on more than 500 senior business leaders across 50 economies.

It finds that 92% of leaders expect sustainability to be a source of competitive advantage over the next 5–10 years and 89% have maintained or increased sustainability investment over the past year, as capital shifts toward clean energy, electrification, circularity and regenerative agriculture on cost, supply-chain security and resilience grounds.

At the same time 68% now see a disorderly transition as more likely than a year ago and 47% reported higher costs from physical climate impacts, while 85% of leaders favour policy strengthening over delay.

The full report, with seven sector deep-dives plus CEO and policymaker briefings, is available to download from the WBCSD site.

How financial institutions should approach human rights due diligence (HRDD) for companies developing, producing, brokering or exporting weapons and dual-use technologies.

The briefing sets out four practitioner challenges:

• the tension between security-policy pressure and sustainability commitments,
• limited technical capacity,
• hard-to-engage weapons companies, and
• weak ongoing (post-onboarding) due diligence - as defence exclusions come under pressure from rising NATO spending and publicly-backed defence finance.

It then offers six 'anchors' grounded in the UN Guiding Principles and international humanitarian law, arguing that overly narrow controversial-weapons exclusions (for example under the EU's Paris-aligned and Climate Transition Benchmarks) create a 'fiduciary blind spot', particularly around autonomous and AI-enabled systems.

Trellis (formerly GreenBiz) has published 'The State of the Sustainability Profession in 2026', the ninth edition of its biennial survey of more than 500 sustainability professionals at companies with at least US$1 billion in revenue, authored by John Davies and Saul Hansell.

It finds most large businesses are staying the course despite a tougher political climate:

• 46% have increased sustainability headcount and budgets over two years while 25% have cut them, and
• of companies with targets, 57% have maintained and 24% strengthened them.

It also charts a quieter, more compliance-focused posture — 63% have scaled back or rethought sustainability communications and 58% are prioritising compliance — alongside rising professional stress, with 44% finding their jobs less fulfilling than two years ago, though twice as many respondents were optimistic as pessimistic.

BMO Global Asset Management has released 'SpaceX and Mega-IPOs: How Indices Are Adapting' (episode 317 of its Views from the Desk podcast).

The episode examines how index providers including Nasdaq, FTSE Russell and MSCI are rewriting inclusion rules in real time, and what SpaceX's landmark IPO means for passive investors and the exposures embedded in index-tracking products.

Speakers Zayla Saunders, Hilly Cutler and Matt Montemurro discuss how the specific index an investor owns increasingly determines the concentration and mega-cap exposure they get.