International asset manager Robeco announced the key focus areas for its 2025 corporate engagement activity, with a continued focus on ‘evergreen’ issues including climate, nature and human rights, an expansion of engagement on deforestation in commodity supply chains, and new themes including supply chains in transition minerals and shareholder rights.

According to Robeco, the firm chooses engagement themes each year through consultations with clients, its investment teams, and other external stakeholders. The firm’s engagement programs include core ongoing themes focused on climate change, biodiversity and human rights, and focus themes targeting specific sustainability sub-topics, which typically have a defined three-year time horizon.

Among its key focus areas this year, Robeco said that it will expand its current engagement on nature to cover natural resource management, and a wider range of commodities affected by deforestation.

Peter van der Werf, Head of Active Ownership at Robeco, said:

“There will be a lot more attention on deforestation as we expand our engagement from palm oil to include soy, beef, leather, paper and pulp in that program as well. We’re also looking to expand our natural resource management theme in which we focus on water and waste, because those are also important drivers of biodiversity loss, which is another topic we want to address.”

Robeco said that its new engagement theme targeting the transition metals supply chain comes as the focus of climate change initiatives increasingly moves towards the achievement of net zero emissions, setting transition as a principle topic. The firm said that the transition minerals engagements will focus both on climate and on human rights, building on existing themes for Just Transition and net zero carbon emissions engagement.

Ghislaine Nadaud, Senior Sustainability Investing Specialist at Robeco said:

“In our engagement with transition sectors, we will be not only focusing on downstream or upstream activities. In the transportation sector, we’ll be looking at the whole electric vehicle battery supply chain, from the mining of the critical minerals needed, to the wider issue of the electrification transition.

“We’ll investigate some of the battery makers and maybe some of EV producers as well. So, it’s really taking a whole supply chain perspective in these transition sectors and not just zeroing in on individual companies.”

Robeco’s engagement on its other new theme, focused on shareholder rights, will take a different form than its typical corporate engagements, according to the firm, with a focus on policy rather than company engagement. According to Robeco Head of Voting Michiel van Esch, the new theme comes as shareholder rights are “being watered down or changed” in several jurisdictions, including in Europe, as governments and regulators have been applying business-friendly regulations in order to make stock market listings more attractive, with unintended consequences impacting shareholder rights.

Esch added:

“The idea is to ultimately protect our investments at large, rather than looking to make changes at a small set of companies in one theme or investment portfolio.”