What would it look like if institutional investors responsible for stewarding assets worth tens of trillions of dollars were to push governments to go further and faster on driving decarbonisation? What would it take to make this happen? What might motivate (more) investors to put serious resources into promoting policies that will tilt the real economy towards net zero? And how can we ensure those efforts are effective?

These are the questions at the heart of this project, supported by the Generation Foundation. The project will run for 2 years (from January 2025), during which time we will be engaging with investors and other stakeholders around the world to understand the current state of play and what it will take to make real economy policy engagement for net zero the new normal within the finance sector.

Investors have a legal duty to manage systemic risks like climate change and policy advocacy is one of the tools available to them to do so (alongside asset allocation and stewardship). However, at present, few investors appear to be doing meaningful climate policy engagement.

Through research and engagement with industry stakeholders, we aim to uncover:

• What leading practice looks like in terms of investors doing real economy policy engagement today.
• What barriers are preventing them from doing more real economy policy engagement and how these can be overcome.
• Where the biggest opportunities for mobilising investor action on this agenda are.

We will be publishing our findings in 2026 in a report that will set out the strategic rationale(s) for investors to resource climate policy advocacy, highlight existing examples of good practice from across the industry, and identify pathways for scaling these existing pockets of good practice.