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 both on the African continent and in Europe, with a global footprint of clients, offices and staff, we are connected to the world through the work we do and recognize the importance of having a global outlook in how we operate – including on environmental issues.
Recognising this year’s Earth Day theme “Our Power, Our Planet”, focussing on renewable energy and clean electricity generation, we want to share what efforts we undertook over the past years to deliver against this and other 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 therefore 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 focussing 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, where possible moving to efficient and environmentally optimised offices or undertaking material refurbishments ourselves where required.
Recent examples include our new Isle of Man office where, through a significant refurbishment including installing new boilers, we considerably reduced fossil fuel use. Our new Guernsey office, is fitted with a modern VRV aircon system, which circulates only the minimum amount of refrigerant needed at any one time and will significantly lower our energy use. Our new Geneva and Monaco offices are both located in energy efficient buildings. These and other efforts will help us reduce our energy use and emissions materially.
Our procurement and suppliers:
Further, 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, or 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 clean services in September 2024.
Many more such initiatives aimed at improving our environmental footprint, but also 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, for which we collect energy, water and waste data across offices. While an ongoing process, our aim is to in the near future 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 work hard to ensure we deliver against this ambition through how we serve our clients – including our investments and operations.