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Citi Institute has published The Boardroom's New Mandate: Governing Agentic AI Responsibly, arguing that autonomous "agentic" AI is now a board-level fiduciary risk rather than a technology project to be delegated to the CTO.

It sets out five pillars of responsible AI oversight — people, process, technology, data and governance — stressing that directors need enough AI literacy to challenge assumptions and that robust oversight is itself an enabler of faster, safer AI adoption.

The piece highlights growing regulatory exposure, noting the EU AI Act can impose penalties of up to €35 million or 7% of annual turnover for non-compliance. It concludes that successful agentic-AI adoption depends on combining innovation with disciplined risk management embedded across the organisation.

East Capital Group has published its Sustainable Investment Report 2025, covering the group-level responsible investment and stewardship activities of both East Capital and Espiria for calendar year 2025.

Key data

- Publication date: 11 May 2026
- Report type: Annual RI
- Period covered: Year to end Dec 2025
- Frequency: Annual
- Scope: Whole-of-operations
- Fundamental focus: Multi-category

Contents and focal points

- East Capital stewardship: 67 engagements with 49 companies; 175 company meetings voted; AI tools deployed to reduce proxy meeting review time from 45 to 15 minutes per meeting
- Espiria stewardship: 27 engagements with 19 companies; 72 company meetings voted
- Thematic and product developments: Alibaba engagement recognised by Nature Action 100; new Global Emerging Markets ex China Article 9 fund launched

Specifics

- Sustainability themes: Nature and biodiversity (Nature Action 100 engagement), climate transition, governance, emerging markets ESG integration
- Sectors of focus: Emerging markets; technology (AI governance and proxy AI)
- Companies featured (include): Alibaba (nature risk engagement, Nature Action 100)

Team update

The ESG team is led by Huizi Zeng (Head of ESG) and George Svensson (ESG Analyst), alongside Karine Hirn (Partner, responsible investment oversight). East Capital and Espiria report separately within the group structure, with this document providing a combined group-level view.

Differentiators

East Capital discloses a specific AI productivity gain in stewardship operations: proxy meeting review time reduced from 45 to 15 minutes per meeting (67% reduction) using AI tools — an unusually concrete operational disclosure. The Alibaba engagement being formally recognised under the Nature Action 100 framework is notable given the rarity of named emerging-market companies in nature-risk programmes. Two-brand reporting (East Capital + Espiria) within a single group document is also unusual in the peer group."

Boston Common Asset Management has published its Active Shareowner Update: Q1 2026 containing details on the points summarised below:

Key data

- Publication date: 1 April 2026
- Report type: Stewardship
- Period covered: Quarter to end March 2026
- Frequency: Quarterly
- Scope: Whole-of-operations
- Fundamental focus: Engagement & stewardship

Contents and focal points

- Corporate Sustainability Disclosure: Progress is Structural, Not Cyclical — the case for standardised, increasingly mandatory sustainability disclosure as a durable input to long-term risk assessment and capital allocation
- The Power of the Proxy: Strengthening Governance Through Active Ownership — proxy voting as a core stewardship tool amid mounting pressure on shareholder rights, particularly in the US
- AI, Armed Conflict and Investor Responsibility / Climate Engagement: A Risk Analysis Tool for the Engaged Investor — investor oversight of how technology firms govern AI use in high-risk and military settings, and direct climate engagement as regulatory frameworks weaken

Specifics

- Sustainability themes: Corporate sustainability disclosure, AI accountability and responsible AI, climate transition risk, corporate governance
- Sectors of focus: Technology (AI governance and deployment in conflict settings)

Team update

The update is authored by named members of the stewardship team: Lauren Compere (Head of Stewardship & Engagement), Amy Orr (Director of US Shareholder Engagement) and Calvin Bader (Sustainability Analyst).

Differentiators

Boston Common devotes a dedicated piece to investor responsibility for AI use in armed conflict — arguing technology providers retain leverage over deployment through contractual terms, technical architecture and monitoring systems — a national-security-and-AI framing rarely found in quarterly stewardship commentary.

... contains:

• Our vision of sustaianbility (including pivotal themes)
• Sustainable investing
• Impact investing
• Active stewardship

Hugh Wheelan interviews Simon Rawson, Executive Director of the Taskforce on Inequality and Social-related Financial Disclosures (TISFD), on "why TISFD believes social factors are central to societal resilience, long-term value creation, and investment decision-making."

• The origin and mission of TISFD, and who’s involved.
• How business might be incentivised to build stronger, more resilient societies
• Could the public push governments to put people-related issues at the center of long-term business and financial value?
• How realistic is it for business and finance to actually measure and report on people-related risk?

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Discussion paper on how climate risk is interpreted, governed and acted upon by UK pension schemes.

Works through three climate pathways as governance stress-tests and traces their distinct implications for DB, DC, CDC and LGPS arrangements - including:

• covenant strength
• endgame planning
• insurance-market resilience and
• member outcomes.

The report also examines fiduciary duty, noting trustees must weigh systemic climate risk within existing legal duties, and makes a business case for pension-scheme climate policy advocacy.

Annual assessment of the global green economy drawing on green-revenues data across more than 21,000 listed companies.

Green revenues grew 5.3% in 2025 - the fastest pace since 2022 - with expansion across 75% of the 133 green segments tracked, driven by accelerating electrification, AI-related electricity demand, energy-efficiency pressures and clean transport growth.

Considered as a standalone industry, the green economy would now be the world's third largest, surpassing healthcare

Analysis of physical climate risk to Iberian hydropower, matching 36 years of Spanish and Portuguese reservoir data to the six largest operators — roughly 8.3 GW of capacity-weighted generation across 48 reservoirs.

In the 44 driest months on record, Iberdrola's fleet held around 74% of capacity while Naturgy's sat below 40%: a 34-point dispersion in drought resilience between two investment-grade utilities that the authors argue investors should price, rather than applying a blanket climate discount.

The piece also identifies a statistically robust 1.9-percentage-point-per-decade storage decline at Endesa (material to parent Enel) and shows pumped-storage design measurably improves resilience versus conventional reservoirs.

Quantifies how physical climate risk is flowing through to corporate financial performance.

Climate risk is showing up as real business cost

Modeled results for large U.S. companies indicate that climate impacts can translate into meaningful, recurring losses from both physical damage and business interruption, turning disruption into an ongoing cost of operating, not just a rare shock.

Extreme weather can create outsized, correlated downside

When severe events hit, losses can scale quickly across multiple companies at once. In a modeled 1-in-100-year scenario, impacts on major U.S. firms rise sharply, highlighting how tail risk can become a portfolio-wide problem rather than a single-asset issue.

Markets respond quickly to disclosed disruption

Companies tend to see a near-term stock decline (around 3%) following the disclosure of a weather-related disaster, reinforcing the view that markets increasingly treat physical climate disruption as financially material.

Analysing 866 US sectoral employment series, LOIM finds around three-quarters show a statistically significant trend change since ChatGPT's launch in late 2022.

• Most negative (warehousing, temporary help, business support, computer systems design)
• ~20% positive (nursing and residential care, social assistance, passenger transport, infrastructure).

The authors conclude AI is not yet eliminating jobs at the macro level but is already redistributing where employment growth occurs, consistent with classic structural-change theory. 

The Banking on Climate Chaos coalition has published its 2026 Fossil Fuel Finance Report, the seventeenth edition of the annual league table of bank fossil-fuel financing.

The world's 65 largest banks committed USD 906 billion to fossil fuel companies in 2025 — up around 8% year-on-year — taking the total since the Paris Agreement to USD 8.7 trillion, with financing for fossil-fuel expansion jumping 27% to USD 508 billion.

A new 'BOCC+' dataset extends coverage to roughly 2,000 banks, and the authors find six financial centres account for 87% of all fossil financing.

Key takeaways

• Even as numerous top banks pull back, nearly two-thirds of the world’s largest 65 banks continue to fuel a fragile and unstable fossil energy system.
• Bank financing for fossil fuel expansion jumped over 27% in a single year.
• “Dirty Dozen” banks now provide more than a third of global fossil finance.
• Top banks are concentrating their fossil financing in fewer, more leveraged fossil fuel borrowers.
• Six financial centers hold the keys to phasing out fossil fuel financing.

Frames AI as both a sustainability risk and opportunity for long-term investors

• Risk channels include a rapidly growing carbon and water footprint, plus labour-market and social-cohesion disruption
• Opportunities include its potential to compound efficiency gains, accelerate clean-technology discovery and scale proven solutions at near-zero marginal cost.

The authors conclude that AI should be treated as a 'sustainability transition variable', integrated into portfolio construction, engagement priorities and risk-assessment frameworks.

Key takeaways

• "Critical minerals are essential to the global energy transition. However, mining activities can pose significant sustainability and financial risks for investors.
• An assessment based on the Initiative for Responsible Mining Assurance (IRMA) standard using ISS STOXX Corporate Rating indicators shows that companies have strong policy adoption but weak implementation. While most companies have human rights, labour, and environmental policies, fewer demonstrate robust human rights due diligence, credible targets, or consistent operational practices.
• A nature impact and dependency assessment on a mining operator's universe based in Asia indicated that mining operators depended heavily on water-related ecosystem services. They simultaneously drive negative environmental impacts related to land-use change, pollution, and climate change.
• The physical climate risks to mining assets are set to intensify under high-emissions scenarios. According to ISS STOXX models, water-stress and heatwave exposure across Asian mine assets will increase significantly over the next 15–30 years, threatening operational continuity and cost structures.
• Engagement remains an investor tool to assess and manage portfolio companies' risks related to pollution, Indigenous rights, community consultation, and climate-related governance.
• In addition, investors can enhance portfolio resilience by tilting towards issuers with a stronger sustainability profile (leaders), while engaging with industry laggards to close implementation gaps. Investors can also start to embed nature- and climate-risk analytics in investment processes."

Contents

• Critical minerals in Asia's energy transition: Demand, risks, and supply chain dynamics
• Critical minerals mining in Asia: An IRMA-aligned sustainability assessment
• Nature risks in critical minerals mining: Dependencies and Impacts
• Geospatial data–climate risk exposure assessmentInvestor engagement on critical minerals mining: Case Studies

The First Sentier MUFG Sustainable Investment Institute seeks to commission a comprehensive research report on sustainability-related issues in data centres, focusing on financial materiality, sustainability-related risks, and systemic implications for investors.

The report will aim to quantify financial materiality, assess systemic risks and their potential impact on valuations, and provide investment insights across asset classes including engagement guidance. Case studies will be used to demonstrate risks and opportunities including sustainability impacts on production timelines, capex, and revenue. Expected sources include literature (industry reports, media, NGOs, international organisations, academic articles), datasets and industry sources.

Deliverable will include a completed report comprising research outcomes, data, visuals and engagement toolkit.

Proposed timelines:

• This RFP is issued on 29.06.2026
• Any questions or feedback regarding the brief should be submitted by 6.07.2026
• Answers to any questions will be provided by 8.07.2026
• Proposal should be submitted to the Institute by 10.07.2026 together with availability for a 1 hour call to discuss the proposals in the week of 13.07.2026
• Target for notifying the successful tenderer by 17.07.2026

Published: 4 March 2026

Summary: Ericsson's Annual Report incorporates a CSRD/ESRS-aligned Sustainability Statement covering climate strategy, responsible AI, supply-chain management, human rights and circularity.