ABSTRACT

Climate change mitigation has presented a serious problem for global regulators. An area that is emerging from a collection of legislative initiatives of the European Commission is the role of institutional investors in holding companies accountable for decisions that have a climate change impact. These legislative initiatives are the Revised Shareholder Rights Directive, Disclosures Regulation, Taxonomy Regulation and Revised Benchmarks Regulation. The article analyses each piece of legislation critically and seeks to describe their cumulative effect in terms of what is required of institutional investors. This article argues that these legislative initiatives will, together, create a normative expectation that institutional investors adopt, to a greater extent than has been previously observed, the role of activist with respect to the climate change impacts of investee companies. The article then describes the possibility of enforcement of this normative expectation by non-State actors.

摘要

减缓气候变化给全球监管机构带来了严重问题。欧盟委员会一系列立法举措中出现的一个领域是机构投资者在要求公司对具有气候变化影响的决策负责方面的作用。这些立法举措是经修订的股东权利指令、披露法规、分类法规和经修订的基准法规。本文批判性地分析了每一项立法，并试图根据对机构投资者的要求来描述它们的累积效应。本文认为，这些立法举措将共同创造一种规范的期望，机构投资者在比以前观察到的更大程度上采用，积极分子在被投资公司的气候变化影响方面的作用。然后，本文描述了非国家行为者强制执行这一规范期望的可能性。