To round out a fascinating 2024, this quarter’s lead article looks at one of the more overlooked topics in responsible investment – the social category. This is a broad area, often underweighted by the quantitative ratings agencies due to its hard-to-measure nature. Our article focuses on two areas that we believe will move increasingly into the spotlight this year.

Firstly, the social flipside of the energy transition, where resilience, adaptation, and local politics are replacing multinational decarbonisation targets as the main issues shaping broader discussion and policy.

Secondly, we highlight the emergence of artificial intelligence and its associated implications for safety, regulation, and the prospects for ‘Big Tech’ incumbents. This latter topic has been thrown into sharp relief in recent weeks thanks to the claims made by China’s DeepSeek AI model. Both are areas to which we look forward to returning in more depth in the future.

As usual, the report also contains data and discussion regarding our engagement and voting activity this quarter.

We hope you enjoy the report, and please do reach out with any questions.