The 2025 proxy season (July 1, 2024 – June 20, 2025, meetings) concluded with a significant drop in the volume of shareholder proposals from the 2024 proxy season’s record high, as environmental and social (E&S) proposals...more
On January 31, 2025, Vanguard issued its proxy voting policy for US portfolio companies, following the publication of BlackRock’s proxy voting guidelines for benchmark policies – US securities in December 2024. The updates...more
2024 was an active year for environmental, social and governance (ESG) regulations, voluntary reporting standards, and stakeholder policies. While the incoming Trump administration is expected to halt federal sustainability...more
On October 7, 2023, California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed the Voluntary Carbon Market Disclosures Act (VCMDA) – AB 1305 – which will impose new requirements applicable to companies making climate-related claims, as well as...more
In January 2023, the European Union adopted the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD), which requires EU and non-EU companies with activities in the EU to file annual sustainability reports alongside their...more
At Cooley, we’re increasingly speaking to clients in the US, Asia and elsewhere who are surprised by the intensity of environmental, social and governance (ESG) requests and covenants coming from their investors. Often these...more
Many of our earlier stage private company clients believe that ESG is mainly a concern of public companies (for an explanation of what ESG is, see this post). They see the growing pressure on US publicly traded companies to...more
ESG? SDGs? SASB? GRI? TCFD? The world of ESG (Environmental, Social and Governance) is littered with acronyms and can seem like an alphabet soup to companies just getting started. This article introduces you to some of the...more