There was a ‘steep drop’ in the number of shareholder resolutions on sustainability that got significant support in 2025, a new report by the Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance, based on research from Morningstar, has found.
According to the report, which tracked shareholder support for sustainability issues in the United States, during the 2025 proxy year, only 30 sustainability-related shareholder resolutions achieved ‘significant’ support – in other words, earning at least 30% approval from independent shareholders.
This compared to more than 100 such resolutions in each of the preceding five years, the data showed.
‘Information gap’
‘These significant resolutions are a useful guide to the sustainability topics institutional investors view as material and are prepared to use the proxy-voting process to request greater transparency,’ the report noted. ‘So, the shrinking number of significant resolutions creates an information gap when it comes to assessing what those topics are.’
The fall in support reflects a broader decline in the total number of shareholder resolutions on environmental and social themes, which fell by 40% in the 2025 proxy year following changes to regulatory guidance from the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Average support for these resolutions stood at 13% in 2025, compared with 16% the previous year, and well down from a peak of 33% in 2021.
Environmental resolutions
The drop-off in resolutions has had the most impact in environment-related areas, with only five significant resolutions on environmental themes recorded in 2025: three on climate matters and two on other environment-related matters.
This compares to more than 30 in each of the previous two years.
The remaining resolutions were concentrated in areas such as political influence and lobbying (which accounted for nearly half of resolutions), and included eight resolutions that targeted tech firms such as Alphabet, Meta Platforms and Microsoft.
The data also points to a widening divergence between US and European asset managers – in the US, average support for significant sustainability resolutions fell by 11 percentage points to 31% over the past three years.
In contrast, among 18 European firms, there was a three-percentage-point drop to 91% over the same period.
As the authors note, the findings of the report illustrate that ‘recent market sentiment toward sustainability in the US is largely reflected by the shrinking population size of significant resolutions, with average support trends remaining more resilient.’ Read more here.
