(Wednesday 21st May) New research published today by ShareAction has exposed alarming failures by the world’s largest asset managers to respond effectively to the climate and social crises wreaking havoc around the world. The trillion-dollar industry continues to pave the way for fossil fuel expansion, environmental degradation and the proliferation of dangerous arms including nuclear weapons.

The fifth edition of Point of No Returns ranks 76 of the largest players in the market, who together control over $80 trillion assets under management, on whether they meet achievable responsible investment standards. 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. While asset managers might have reasonable policies across a small number of their funds, the findings call into question their broader approach, which prioritises short-term profit over long-term sustainability.

ShareAction, the charity campaigning for responsible investment, set 20 attainable standards that asset managers are expected to achieve – but alarmingly, 87 per cent of the managers don’t even meet half of them. The standards ask whether asset managers are including robust climate policies, avoiding damage to important ecosystems and protecting human rights, and all were met by at least one asset manager. Asset managers who failed 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 reveals 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. These findings suggest that a more robust regulatory framework can help drive greater positive impact, underlining the critical importance of safeguarding sustainable finance regulation in the EU and UK. Recent proposals in the EU, particularly the Omnibus package, raise concerns and risk weakening key sustainability rules in a moment when they must be defended.

Gray continued: “It’s encouraging to see some asset managers leading the charge on responsible investment, but ultimately we need others to follow suit and for ambition to be much higher right across the sector.

“Asset owners need to push asset managers to secure their long-term interests. At this critical time, they must keep the pressure on their managers to take the steps needed to protect people and planet for generations to come, even if it means ending relationships with firms who fail to meet their expectations on responsible investment.”

Other key findings from the report include:

• 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 our 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.

Notes to editors

The methodology used in this report was developed by ShareAction to assess asset managers' performance on responsible investment across themes of governance, stewardship, climate, biodiversity, and social impacts. Adapting this methodology, South African shareholder activism organisation JustShare will be publishing its own ranking of 40 major South African asset managers in July 2025.

The highest performing non-European asset manager in the report was Nomura, which received a C grade. Every other Asian and North American manager received a D, E or F grade. The three highest performing European asset managers include Robeco and APG Asset Management, both receiving an A grade, and Axa Investment Managers, which received a B grade.

BlackRock, Fidelity Investments, State Street Global Advisors and Vanguard are the largest asset managers in the world – their combined assets under management is more than $28 trillion. They are also the largest shareholder in the overwhelming majority of S&P 500 companies, collectively owning more than a fifth of these companies’ shares on average. These managers all received an E or F grade.

At the end of 2023, the largest 500 asset managers controlled over $130 trillion in assets, eight times the net wealth of the entire UK economy. This sum also represents the overwhelming majority of the asset manager sector – the 76 managers covered in this benchmark represent more than half of the sector’s total assets with over $80 trillion in assets.