BlackRock turned down record number of climate proposals amid inflation, ESG pushback

BlackRock, the world's largest asset manager, voted against the vast majority of shareholder proposals related to climate and social issues during the 2022-2023 proxy voting season, the company reported Wednesday.

Overall, BlackRock turned down 742 of the 813 proposals it voted on and 373, or 93%, of the social and climate proposals it faced, according to the company's 2023 Investment Stewardship report published Wednesday morning and shared with FOX Business. The trillion-dollar asset manager explained that it has seen a higher number of low-quality shareholder proposals, largely due to federal guidance issued by the Biden administration in 2021.

"We observed a greater number of overly prescriptive proposals or ones lacking economic merit,"Joud Abdel Majeid, BlackRock's global head of investment stewardship, wrote in the report. "Importantly, the majority of these proposals failed to recognize that companies are already meeting their asks."

"Because so many proposals were over-reaching, lacking economic merit, or simply redundant, they were unlikely to help promote long-term shareholder value and received less support from shareholders, including BlackRock, than in years past," she continued.