We believe understanding sustainability factors and trends is fundamental to effective asset management. This report sets out our approach and includes an overview of our holistic stewardship activities over the past year
Being part of a parent company that is over 300 years old, we understand what it takes to adapt, thrive and partner with clients in a changing world. Sustainability themes such as energy security, climate change, demographics, and access to critical minerals will continue to shape the evolution of our economies and societies. At the same time, mismanagement of environmental impacts, human capital and the erosion of governance standards continue to present material investment risks. To manage those changes, risks and opportunities, we remain committed to embedding sustainability insights into how we allocate and steward capital on behalf of our clients.
And against a rapidly evolving geopolitical backdrop, we continuously review and enhance our approach to sustainable investing, to ensure we remain laser-focused on delivering the long-term risk-adjusted returns and real-world outcomes our clients expect.
Data-led and disciplined investment approach
In 2025, we improved our data analytics and modelling capabilities, to enable investment teams to better understand potential portfolio-level sustainability risks, model stress scenarios, and manage trade-offs in increasingly volatile markets.
Alongside this, we have maintained our disciplined approach to identifying diversified sustainability-linked investment opportunities across public and private asset classes (see Figure 1 for our private-market highlights). We subject these opportunities to rigorous due diligence and robust risk management. This enables us to build resilient portfolios that protect and grow our clients’ assets over the long term.
Key to our approach has been applying globally recognised standards, including the Buildings Research Establish Environmental Assessment Method (BREEAM), a leading global sustainability assessment method. We also submit portfolios for assessment under the Global Real Estate Sustainability Benchmark (GRESB), a global ESG benchmark for real estate and infrastructure, providing standardised, validated data to assess the sustainability performance of property portfolios.
Figure 1: 2025 private market sustainable investing highlights
Note: The specific assets identified above are not typically held in all of our private-market strategies.
Source: Aviva Investors. Data as of 31 December 2025.
Holistic stewardship across all levels of the financial system and real economy
Last year, we also continued to undertake holistic stewardship. This means we conduct engagement with stakeholders across the financial system, seeking to ensure that our interventions at different levels mutually reinforce each other. That includes engaging with policymakers and regulators to help shape policy frameworks and to unlock long-term value for investors, as we continue to connect the dots across the economic and political ecosystem.
Therefore, we use engagement, as well as our voting and investment decisions, to support the transition to a sustainable future (see Figure 2).
Figure 2: 2025 stewardship highlights
Substantive company
engagements4
Substantive
sovereign engagements5
Positive
engagement outcomes6
Total number of
votes on resolutions
Total number of shareholder meetings at
which Aviva Investors voted on resolutions
Note: We can engage with any given company or sovereign more than once in a year.
Source: Aviva Investors. Data as of 31 December 2025.
- Our approach and the frameworks that guide our decision-making.
- The ways we integrate sustainability insights into our investment and stewardship activities.
- Our holistic stewardship work, including how engagement, voting, research, and collaboration collectively contribute to the outcomes we seek on behalf of clients.
References
- BREEAM (the Buildings Research Establish Environmental Assessment Method) is a leading global sustainability assessment method that rates the environmental performance of buildings across areas such as energy, health, materials, and ecology. Of the over 600 real estate assets we manage, 124 have BREEAM or equivalent certificates, of which 90 were newly awarded in 2025.
- GRESB (the Global Real Estate Sustainability Benchmark) is the global ESG benchmark for real estate and infrastructure, providing standardised, validated data to assess and compare the sustainability performance of property portfolios. We submitted 8 of our real estate funds (out of a possible 14 funds) in 2025, which received an average increase of 9 points each. The total possible GRESB score per fund is 100 and our average 2025 score across our 8 funds is 80.3.
- The funding we provided is not expected to cover the full 11m kilowatt hours. We are not the sole investor in this company.
- Company engagements are defined as interactions with corporate entities on sustainability and governance issues in interactions led by the Public Markets ESG team. Interactions led by investment teams (including research meetings) are not reported here, however investment teams may have participated in ESG team-led engagements. Substantive engagements are defined as targeted and tailored interactions including bilateral meetings, correspondence, group meetings and consultation responses.
- Sovereign engagements are defined as interactions conducted by the Fixed Income ESG team with countries and multilateral institutions e.g. the International Monetary Fund. Substantive engagements are defined as targeted and tailored interactions including bilateral meetings, correspondence, group meetings and consultation responses.
- Engagement outcomes are changes in the behaviour of an entity that are in line with one of our prior engagement asks.
