Insights
Active Stewardship with Stonehage Fleming
Earth Day – Environmental Stewardship at Stonehage Fleming
Earth Day is a special day for Stonehage Fleming. Having our roots in both Africa and Europe, with a global footprint of clients, offices and staff, we are connected to the world through the work we do and recognise the importance of having a global outlook in how we operate – including on environmental issues.
In accordance with this year’s Earth Day theme “Our Power, Our Planet”, which centres on renewable energy and clean electricity generation, we want to share what efforts we undertook over the past few years to deliver on our global environmental ambitions.
Our investments:
As stewards of intergenerational wealth, we have always had an extended time horizon. A failure to consider all stakeholders, including the planet, when providing investment solutions would be doing our investors a significant disservice. Through engagements with companies and third-party managers, we aim to ensure they robustly respond to financially material environmental challenges, including climate change.
For our Global Best Ideas Equity Fund, we ran a project to understand if the underlying company holdings gave sufficient care to their climate risk management and emissions governance. The engagement is ongoing, but we are encouraged by the received responses and ongoing conversations.
Similarly, for our Global Responsible Investment Fund, we ran a project with the third-party managers focusing on better understanding their climate risk management and Net-Zero ambitions. The process was similarly fruitful and reassuring.
For further detail on both engagements, please see our 2025 Stewardship Report once released.
Our offices:
In 2023, we moved our main London office to a ‘BREEAM’ certified building – a certification used to specify and measure the sustainability performance of buildings. The move has significantly reduced our energy use. Since then, we have continued this trend for other office relocations, such moving to efficient and environmentally optimised offices when possible or undertaking material refurbishments where required.
Recent examples include our new Isle of Man office. Through a significant refurbishment and installing new boilers, we considerably reduced fossil fuel use. Our new Guernsey office is fitted with a modern VRV aircon system, which circulates the minimum amount of refrigerant needed at any one time and significantly lowers our energy use. Our new Geneva and Monaco offices are both located in energy efficient buildings. These initiatives, along with our other efforts, will help us reduce our energy use and emissions materially.
Our procurement and suppliers:
Furthermore, other office-specific environmental initiatives include the inclusion of plants across new offices for better room climate, the reduction of serving of red meat at our London office canteen, and the replacement of chemicals for natural alternatives for our cleaning services at our London office. In addition, we have started reviewing options to shift to responsible, living wage and employee owned suppliers, which we proudly did for our London cleaning services in September 2024.
Many more initiatives aimed at improving our environmental footprint and increasing community contributions are currently under considerations across the Group.
Our operational data gathering and target setting:
Over the last three years, we have started a broader process of operational environmental data gathering, whereby we collect energy, water and waste data across offices. While this is an ongoing process, our aim is to be in a position to set ourselves firm-wide performance targets, including for operational Net-Zero emissions. Renewable energy procurement and energy efficiency measures will play an important role in this.
Stonehage Fleming sees the environment as one of our key constituents. We want to be a good steward of the planet, and we work hard to ensure we deliver against this ambition through how we serve our clients – including our investments and operations.