Engagement Report 2024

Transforming Engagement Practices: An Imperative Amidst Urgent Transition Needs

Shareholder engagement has established itself over the years as a cornerstone of responsible investing. Dialogue, co-construction, influence: these are just a few of the levers that investors mobilize to encourage companies to better consider social and environmental issues. At Mirova, we have always made this practice a pillar of our approach. 

The last two years have been marked by a challenging macroeconomic environment, against the backdrop of increasing turbulence surrounding ESG issues. In the United States in particular, sustainability has often been sidelined amidst heightened political and societal tensions. Yet, the climate and environmental urgency shows no signs of diminishing: each passing month serves as a reminder of the scale of the transformations that need to be undertaken. Despite this, transition plans remain largely insufficient to address the systemic challenges we face. At the same time, a regulatory turning point is looming in Europe with the imminent revision of the SFDR regulation, promising greater accountability and renewed attention to the transition. 

In the face of this complexity, some financial players are scaling back their ambitions, while others retreat behind a posture of indignation. Mirova chooses a different path: to double down on efforts, to engage even more actively on transition issues, and to affirm our role as a transformative investor. Engagement is at the heart of this approach. In 2024, we have strengthened our approach. Firstly, by targeting our interventions more effectively: our efforts now focus more sharply on the issuers that are most critical for the transition, and on the levers we can concretely activate, embedding our dialogues within ambitious transformation trajectories supported by credible and verifiable indicators . Secondly, by seeking to better evaluate the impact of our actions, even though this evaluation remains complex . Finally, by fully embracing our position as an engaged investor, actively collaborating with sectoral initiatives and investor coalitions, as well as with regulators and civil society. 

In this regard, we also sought to strengthen the links between our engagement approach and our research and innovation strategy. It is in this spirit that the Mirova Research Center was launched, our initiative dedicated to the production and sharing of knowledge useful for financing the transition. This approach aims to bridge academic and operational perspectives to better inform our decisions. We have thus engaged in several projects in collaboration with ENSAE, focusing on impact approaches and the evaluation of engagement practices. These efforts directly feed into our reflections on how to make our commitments more robust, targeted, and better equipped to accompany the transformation of companies. This report aims to account for these developments. It shares our convictions, our concrete actions, the results we observe—but also the limitations of the exercise and the questions we still grapple with. For while we believe in the transformative power of engagement, we know it can only be one of the tools of a coherent investor. The challenge of the transition demands clear decisions, aligned strategies, and a determined mobilization of all available levers. 

Our ambition for 2025 is clear: to make engagement an active and structuring pillar of our transition financing strategy. This report is both a reflection of that ambition and the starting point for a new phase: more transparency, more coherence, more action.