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During 2024 we moved 62 of our engagement objectives to successful closure, with the strategies or measures we see as best practice successfully implemented by the company. Examples of these include:

• Twenty companies implementing new or improved climate transition plans, including five companies strengthening measurement and management of Scope 3 carbon emissions
• Seven companies strengthening approaches to corporate governance, including board composition, chair-CEO duality and remuneration
• Five companies identifying, assessing or making commitments with regard to human rights risk exposure
• Two companies announcing third-party validation of climate transition plans and a further two companies setting new decarbonization targets
• Two companies linking climate commitments or targets to executive remuneration
• Two companies introducing responsible marketing policies in line with World Health Organization (WHO) guidelines

During 2024, there were some notable voting trends, and the highlights of our voting are described below.

• ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ-AM support for shareholder proposals in the US declined across categories such as environmental and social proposals (but increased on climate-specific proposals). This was mainly due to:
  • Companies making improvements but shareholder proponents not updating requests, leading us to vote against proposals we had previously supported.
  • Proposals becoming more prescriptive in terms of making quite specific requests in relation to corporate strategy, leading to us not supporting. We don’t believe that it is the role of shareholders to micromanage company strategy
• We continued to vote against relevant directors when we have concerns around lack of action to address financially material climate risk, leading to ‘votes against’ director elections at 10 companies in 2024.
• We observed a trend of some UK companies increasing compensation packages to improve competitiveness versus US peers. We assessed these proposals on a case-by-case basis and supported those where we were comfortable that proposed pay packages were not excessive, and where companies had clear rationales for the increases supported by a shareholder aligned compensation structure.
• In 2024 we voted against more compensation proposals where the performance objectives underpinning variable pay were not being clearly disclosed compared to 2023. We also observed some progress on our previous engagements on this point, with companies beginning to be more transparent, and we were able to support compensation plans this year which we had voted against in previous years.