“SfC pioneers new forms of shareholder engagement”
Alix Roy, ESG Analyst at Ecofi, was elected Vice-President during our Summer Meeting
Three questions to Alix Roy, ESG analyst at Ecofi (France)
The SfC Summer Meeting, held in Geneva on 6-7 June, was full of topics for discussion. What were the three most interesting ideas you took back to Paris?
One of the moments I found most instructive and useful was the collective dialogue with data providers Moody’s ESG, MSCI and Sustainalytics on how they integrate controversies into their ESG ratings. It’s also in this context that the strength of a collective like Shareholders for Change comes into its own. This is also something we could potentially replicate in the future with proxy voting service providers, as Rachael Monteiro from WHEB proposed.
Another highlight was the discussion of the two resolutions that were tabled at the TotalEnergies AGM this season and how we had worked together within the network, what had not worked so well and what we could do better.
Finally, a point that came up a number of times during our discussions is the positioning we want to take on how we engage as a network and how we capitalise on the different SRI approaches and strategies. I’m sure we’ll have more debates on this in the future.
Ecofi launched a biodiversity engagement project in which several SfC members collaborated. What positively surprised you in this project and what, on the other hand, disappointed you?
The Biodiversity Commitment Project we launched has enabled us to make initial contact with companies on this issue, which is still new to them and to investors.
On the whole, it has been quite positive that most companies consider biodiversity to be a material issue for their activities and some have started to work on it by developing one or more policies related to the issue and, in the best cases, by starting to assess their impacts and interdependencies.
One of the main limitations of this commitment is the difficulty of assessing the effectiveness of companies’ practices due to the lack of a clear international trajectory, precise and quantified measurements, whether through physical or financial KPIs, or the traceability of companies’ value chains.
For the time being, these various constraints lead us to urge companies to improve their transparency on the subject by carrying out an analysis of their impacts, based on reference frameworks such as the STBN or the TNFD.
What do you think are the advantages of a network like SfC compared to other similar initiatives?
I think that one of the great advantages of Shareholders for Change is the level of engagement/involvement of its members, which, partly due to our size, strengthens the quality of our collaboration on engagements based on shared values and a common vision.