Asset managers stalling on responsible investment progress

Written by Adam Cadle

21/05/2025

Eighty-seven per cent of global asset managers don’t meet half of the standards set out by ShareAction concerning responsible investment.

The fifth edition of Point of No Returns ranks 76 of the largest players in the market, who together control over $80trn AuM, on whether they meet achievable responsible investment standards. ShareAction set 20 attainable standards that asset managers are expected to achieve, including robust climate policies, avoiding damage to important ecosystems and protecting human rights.

Across the board investment firms are failing to consider the long-term interests of asset owners, with progress in the industry stagnating as social and environmental crises deepen, ShareAction said. Asset managers failing to take steps to protect people and planet included the four largest asset managers in the world – BlackRock, Fidelity Investments, State Street Global Advisors and Vanguard.

Claudia Gray, head of financial sector research at ShareAction, said: “We are seeing progress stagnate on responsible investment at a time when rapid action is needed. As critical middlemen of the financial sector, asset managers are making decisions on behalf of clients like pensions funds who ultimately represent the interests of millions of people. If the financial sector keeps failing to address climate change, nature loss and social inequality, there will be considerable economic consequences, threatening the safe and healthy world we all want to live in.”

The report comes as the wider industry is faced with political pressures and an intensifying ESG “backlash”, particularly from the US administration. However, ShareAction’s research revealed that the slowdown in new commitments from asset managers predates this. Of the 60 firms that featured across the charity’s three last benchmarks, all asset managers with a tobacco or coal commitment in the 2025 report already had one in 2022.

A few European asset managers are demonstrating robust responsible investment policies and practices, with Robeco landing the top spot in the benchmark for the third successive time.

At a time of intensifying climate crisis, ShareAction identified only four asset managers with sufficiently strong fossil fuel policies across major fuel types, all based in Europe: APG Asset Management, Nordea Asset Management, Ofi Invest Asset Management and SEB Asset Management.

Less than a third of asset managers have a restriction on all major controversial weapon types. Exceptions in firms’ policies mean that only six out of the 76 managers in ShareAction’s assessment can be reliably expected not to profit from the production of nuclear weapons.

Nature loss is one of the biggest risks to the economy, yet more than half of the asset managers in our benchmark failed to meet a single standard on biodiversity. While some are now disclosing assessments of impacts and dependencies on nature, most asset managers do not consider nature risk in policies for high-impact sectors such as agriculture, mining and fisheries, and do not have any restrictions that protect areas of global biodiversity importance.

Despite decades of awareness of the health impacts of tobacco, only a quarter of asset managers restrict investment in tobacco across most of their funds.

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