Harriet Parker discusses the team’s engagement with investee companies over the past few months including employee well-being, Nature Action 100 Initiative and improving the circularity of their businesses.
Engagement is an important aspect of our process. It's all about holding investee companies to account and helping to drive positive change. I'll give a quick update on some of our activity over the summer months.
We believe that people are the most valuable asset to any business. So, understanding culture and how companies manage their workers is imperative when we're trying to work out how successful a business will be over the long term. Our team's proactive engagement initiative of Ensuring Worker Wellbeing encourages companies to offer decent work and ensure they protect workers' rights, including those further down in their supply chains. As part of this priority, along with other institutions, we're a signatory to the Workforce Disclosure Initiative, which asks companies to provide information and data on their labour practices. Better quality and comparable data helps us identify and differentiate between well managed workforces and those that are perhaps more fragile and more susceptible to shocks from badly managed ones.
Earlier in the year, we contacted over 100 companies held across the funds, asking them to disclose workforce data via this year's survey. During the summer, we learned that over a third of these companies participated, and we look forward to the findings report out later this month.
Another of our proactive initiatives is all about preserving and restoring nature. Last year, our team began to participate in engagement with other investors through the Nature Action 100 initiative, which supports greater corporate ambition and action on tackling nature and biodiversity loss, tracking company progress through an annual benchmark. We were selected to join investor groups for three companies, SmurfitWestrock, Unilever and Roche. The investor groups have met several times, and each group has held introductory calls with these companies. The review window for the benchmark has now closed, and we're looking forward to the initial results, which will be published during COP16, the UN's biodiversity conference that starts later this month. As investor signatories, we'll also get to see the company assessments, which will form part of the continuing engagement with these companies on this important topic.
Also over the quarter, we spoke to several companies about improving the circularity of their business and reducing the lifecycle impacts of their products. This included conversations with the medical device manufacturer, Convertec, and Winmark, a company that operates secondhand shops in the US. As part of another proactive initiative aimed at encouraging the transition to sustainable investment, we met with 16 insurance companies to discuss their responsible underwriting and investment policies. Whilst it's fair to say that these policies aren't really where we'd like them to be, we have been somewhat encouraged by the general understanding of the need to change and improve.
Lastly, we continue to request that companies outline their strategies and their action plans to cut their carbon emissions in line with our one-and-a-half degree transition challenge. Over the quarter, we spoke to several companies, including Technogym, the Italian gym equipment manufacturer, and OTIS, the escalator and lift specialist.
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