The members of Ethos’ international engagement program also approved the engagement topics for 2021 on Thursday. In addition, they approved the launch by Ethos of a new international engagement campaign to mitigate deforestation.
The members of the Ethos shareholder dialogue program held their annual general meeting on Thursday. They validated the dialogue topics with the main listed companies in Switzerland for the next year, including digital corporate responsibility which was accepted as a new topic.
In conjunction with the Swiss Digital Days 2020, the Ethos Foundation publishes an "Engagement Paper" which summarises its expectations in terms of digital corporate responsibility. At a time of galloping digitalisation of the economy, accelerated by the Covid-19 pandemic, Ethos considers that companies must be more transparent and responsible in the way they manage the many challenges related to digitalisation.
The Ethos Engagement Pool Switzerland, the ESG dialogue program with companies listed in Switzerland launched by Ethos and two pension funds more than 15 years ago, has now over 150 members representing total assets of around 265 billion francs.
On April 30, 2020 the Workforce Disclosure Initiative (WDI) released its 2019 annual report. Coordinated by ShareAction and supported by more than 130 investors, including Ethos and the members of the Ethos Engagement Pool International, this initiative calls for greater transparency by listed companies regarding the management of workers in their direct operations and supply chains. An additional 28 of the targeted companies agreed to complete the WDI questionnaire in 2019 bringing the total number of responding companies to 118.
Ethos published the activity reports of the Ethos Engagement Pool Switzerland (EEP Switzerland) and the Ethos Engagement Pool International (EEP International), which expose Ethos' environmental, social and governance (ESG) dialogue activities. A summarised version is publicly available, while the detailed reports are only available to the members of the pools.
The board of Ethos Foundation has decided to amend the eight Socially Responsible Investment principles of Ethos. All companies that generate more than 5% of their turnover with unconventional oil and gas are now excluded from the investment universe. Companies that transport these energy sources by oil or gas pipeline are also excluded. This decision will have no impact on Ethos' funds as the concerned companies had insufficient ESG evaluation to be part of Ethos’ investment funds.
The Ethos Foundation has joined the Shareholders for Change engagement network, which provides a collective engagement platform that allows smaller institutional investors dedicated to socially responsible investment to increase the impact of their engagement activities with European companies.