Courtesy of Sustainable Investments Institute

Climate change, political spending and gender equality top the list of hot issues that shareholders want aired at annual company meetings this proxy season.

As of mid-February proponents filed 429 shareholder resolutions, according to Proxy Preview 2018, a joint report released Thursday by As You Sow, the Sustainable Investments Institute and Proxy Impact.

Michael Passoff, CEO of Proxy Impact and co-author of the report, said climate change and political spending by corporations are the two dominant issues this year, making up about 40 percent of all resolutions.

“The other big picture story this year is about women,” Passoff said. “A resolution may not say 'women' in the title, but there are many different ones touching on the treatment of women, such as the gender pay gap, human trafficking and board diversity.”

The 106-page report is one of the most comprehensive collections of data available on all proxy resolutions. Besides the sheer mass of data and charts, it includes about 30 essays by experts that provide additional insights.

Last year was a historic year for climate change resolutions, Passoff noted, citing two major ones that sought disclosure and that won rare majority votes at Occidental Petroleum Corp. and Exxon Mobil Corp.

“For the first time mega-investment funds like BlackRock [Inc.] voted for a climate resolution,” Passoff said. “It sent a shock wave through the industry.”

Climate resolutions generally ask corporations to adopt goals from the 2016 Paris Climate Agreement, which the Trump administration has refused to accept, although 175 other countries have ratified it.

Other resolutions deal with issues such as cybersecurity, sustainability, opioid accountability and international human rights.

The global human rights discussion in the report covers several pages and countries. It includes a discussion of supply chain standards and ethical recruitment, slavery in supply chains, human trafficking and rights of indigenous people.

The report also names companies facing such resolutions, including supply chain proposals at Amazon.com Inc., Costco Wholesale Corp. and McDonald's; human rights risk proposals at Apple Inc. and Tesla Motors; human trafficking resolutions at JetBlue Airways and Monster Beverage Corp.; and proposals around indigenous people at Bank of America Corp., Citigroup Inc., Goldman Sachs and Wells Fargo.

Behind the scenes of the proxy votes, Passoff said two major questions loom over this season. The first is whether the huge investment funds will continue to take a stand and have an effect on climate change proposals this year.

The second is the impact of a staff legal bulletin from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission last November. It encouraged company boards to weigh in on whether a resolution should be excluded from a proxy vote.

As a result, companies have sought exclusion of 2018 proposals so often that the number of challenges before the SEC was already at a three-year high by Feb. 16, and still rising.

The SEC bulletin “has the potential to upset long-standing interpretations of the shareholder proposal rule and exclusions based on the 'ordinary business' and 'significantly related' portions of the rule,” the report stated.

As Passoff said, shareholders and others must wait to know the answers to the questions in June, at the end of proxy season.