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Published: March 2026 reporting cycle

Summary: Diageo continues to integrate sustainability into its "Spirit of Progress" strategy, covering regenerative agriculture, water stewardship, packaging innovation, responsible drinking and supply-chain resilience.

Published: February 2026

Summary: Carlsberg's report integrates financial and sustainability reporting under its "Together Towards ZERO and Beyond" strategy. Coverage of climate, water efficiency, regenerative agriculture, sustainable packaging and low-carbon brewing operations, together with progress against science-based targets.

Published: February 2026

Summary: Heineken's integrated report continues to develop its "Brew a Better World" strategy, linking sustainable agriculture, water stewardship, circular packaging and responsible consumption with long-term business growth.

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.