Ask an institutional investor whether climate matters to their portfolio and nearly all of them will say yes. Ask their disclosures, and the answer gets more interesting. The Investor Agenda’s new report, the Global State of Investor Climate Action, benchmarks more than 220 institutional investors (101 asset owners and 120 asset managers) across seven regions, and it finds a field that has largely mastered analyzing climate risk while still splitting sharply on acting against it.
The assessment behind the report was carried out by a team from Ceres, PRI, and UNEP FI, with Manifest Climate powering the AI-assisted analysis of investor disclosures. This is their benchmark and their findings; our role was the engine that read the disclosure record at scale. Here is what the data shows, and why it is worth your time to read the full report.
Key takeaways
- The Global State of Investor Climate Action benchmarks 220+ investors’ public disclosures on targets, transition plans, risk management, governance, engagement, and policy advocacy.
- Climate risk analysis is now near-universal (75% assess portfolio climate risk, 67% run scenario analysis), but only 29% of asset owners feed scenarios into strategic asset allocation.
- Target-setting splits the field: 51% have net zero by 2050 targets, and target-setters are dramatically more active on every other measure, from climate solutions (93% vs 47%) to transition plans (88% vs 23%).
- Europe leads on nearly every indicator, driven by regulation; North America lags amid policy uncertainty.
What is the Global State of Investor Climate Action?
The Global State of Investor Climate Action is a benchmark report from The Investor Agenda that assesses the public climate-related disclosures of more than 220 institutional investors worldwide. It tracks progress across portfolio targets, investment in climate solutions, risk management, governance, corporate engagement, and policy advocacy, with the assessment conducted by a team from Ceres, PRI, and UNEP FI and powered by Manifest Climate’s AI.
The sample was built for global representation: investors from Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe, the Middle East, North America, and South America, spanning 101 asset owners and 120 asset managers. Because it reads what investors actually disclose rather than what they say in surveys, it is one of the clearest available pictures of where investor climate practice really stands.
Analysis is nearly universal. Action is not.
The strongest finding in the report is a gap. Globally, 75% of investors undertake portfolio climate risk assessment, and 67% use some form of climate scenario analysis. Those are remarkable adoption numbers for practices that barely existed a decade ago. But only 29% of asset owners report incorporating scenario insights into their strategic asset allocation, which is where analysis becomes capital in motion.
Governance shows the same maturity: 75% of investors have assigned climate responsibility to their boards, with strong majorities in six of seven regions. The infrastructure of climate oversight is built. What the report surfaces is the distance between having the machinery and letting it steer.
Targets are the dividing line
Just over half of the sample (51%) has set a target to reach net zero portfolio emissions by 2050 or sooner, and 49% have interim 2030 targets. The regional split is stark: nearly 87% of European investors set net zero targets, followed by Australia at 60%, while North America and Asia sit under 50%.
What makes targets the report’s most interesting variable is what travels with them. Target-setters are more active on essentially everything: 93% invest in climate solutions versus 47% of non-target-setters, 88% publish transition plans versus 23%, and 73% engage policymakers versus 23%. Whether targets drive the broader practice or signal investors already committed to it, they are the single best predictor of climate action across the whole benchmark.
Some practices, encouragingly, are common on both sides of the line. Even among investors without net zero targets, 53% run portfolio climate risk analysis and 57% engage their portfolio companies on climate.
Transition plans are the new frontier
Globally, 56% of investors disclose transition plans setting out targets, actions, and resources for the shift to a lower-carbon economy. Europe again leads, with more than nine in ten European investors disclosing, helped along by the UK’s Transition Plan Taskforce framework, the EU’s CSDDD, and ISSB standards moving disclosure from voluntary to mandatory. Emissions reporting follows the same arc: 65% of investors now disclose some portion of portfolio emissions, and 62% publish TCFD-aligned reports.
The report also catches two emerging edges worth watching. A majority of investors (60%) now address nature-related risks in their climate strategies, reaching 96% in Europe. And just transition remains early: only 36% of investors globally disclose specific intended actions on the social impacts of decarbonization.
How a 220-investor benchmark actually gets built
Benchmarking 220+ investors on dozens of indicators means reading thousands of pages of disclosures, consistently, across seven regions and multiple languages of reporting practice. That reading problem is what Manifest Climate powered: AI-assisted analysis that collected and structured the disclosure evidence, with the Ceres, PRI, and UNEP FI team owning the assessment judgments. It is the same pattern we see across benchmarking programs generally: the AI removes the reading bottleneck, and the experts spend their time on the calls only experts can make.
💡 Manifest Climate powers benchmark assessments like this one: your framework, applied consistently across hundreds of companies or investors, with source-linked evidence behind every finding. Explore our Benchmarking solution.
What investors should do with this
Three uses, in rising order of ambition. First, read the full report; it is free, and the regional breakdowns and case studies (Oregon Treasury’s scenario work, LGIM and Nest on transition plans) reward the time. Second, benchmark yourself against it: if 75% of your peers assess portfolio climate risk and 56% publish transition plans, your own disclosures now have a measurable context. Third, close your own analysis-to-action gap, whether that means feeding scenario analysis into allocation decisions or tracking climate indicators across your portfolio consistently enough to act on them.
Benchmark with the engine behind the report
Manifest Climate is the AI-powered assessment engine for sustainability, and the Global State of Investor Climate Action shows what it does at full scale: 220+ investors, seven regions, every finding grounded in the disclosure record. The same engine runs benchmarking for investor teams, coalitions, and research organizations on their own frameworks.
If there is a benchmark you have wanted to run and never had the reading capacity for, book a demo and see how it gets built.
Frequently asked questions
What is the Global State of Investor Climate Action report?
It is a benchmark report from The Investor Agenda assessing the public climate disclosures of more than 220 institutional investors (101 asset owners, 120 asset managers) across seven regions. The assessment was conducted by a team from Ceres, PRI, and UNEP FI, with Manifest Climate powering the AI-assisted analysis.
What are the report’s key findings?
Climate risk analysis is near-universal (75% assess portfolio risk, 67% use scenario analysis), but action lags: 51% have net zero by 2050 targets, 56% disclose transition plans, and only 29% of asset owners feed scenario insights into asset allocation. Target-setters are far more active on every other measure.
How many investors have net zero targets?
Globally, 51% of the investors sampled have set a target of net zero portfolio emissions by 2050 or sooner, ranging from nearly 87% in Europe to under 50% in North America and Asia. 49% have also set interim 2030 targets.
Who conducted the assessment behind the report?
A four-person team from Ceres, PRI, and UNEP FI assessed each investor’s public disclosures against indicators of climate-related investment activity, with Manifest Climate’s AI powering the collection and analysis of the disclosure evidence.