Woodside Energy: Escalation due to inadequate response from company to shareholder concerns

Mar 2024

Objective

Encourage the company to pursue a more ambitious climate transition plan and improve climate governance.

Objective

Encourage the company to pursue a more ambitious climate transition plan and improve climate governance.

Engagement type One-to-one

Our engagement

During the first quarter of 2023, we had several engagement meetings with Woodside’s board and management teams to discuss their approach to climate change and their response to their 2021 Say on Climate vote. At Woodside’s Say on Climate vote in 2022, 49% of shareholders voted against their 2021 Climate Report, representing the lowest vote of any Say on Climate proposal globally.

In our meetings with the company, we voiced our concern that the company had not committed to another Say on Climate vote, the lack of material change in strategy from their 2021 Climate Report, as well as their lack of scope 3 emissions targets.

Following engagement with the company, we felt that the business was not responding in a proportionate way with regard to shareholder concerns, particularly at a time when the sector and its role in the energy transition is under scrutiny from many stakeholders, including the government and the Australian public.

The outcome

As a result of those interactions and reviewing research from proxy advisors including Glass Lewis, we decided to escalate our engagement and vote against two directors who were up for re-election at the 2023 AGM.

Although we welcomed Woodside’s commitment to an advisory vote for shareholders at the 2024 AGM, we felt it necessary to voice our discontent with the company’s lack of action in 2022 and 2023, through our voting rights at the AGM. The directors we voted against were both members of the board’s sustainability committee and in our view didn’t have the appropriate skills and experience to have appropriate oversight of the company’s climate transition plan. While both directors were re-elected, they did receive a significant number of votes against them.

Ahead of lodging our voting directives, we sent a letter to Woodside communicating our voting intentions as well as the associated rationale. By providing this feedback, our aim is to encourage Woodside to reposition its board with skills to those required to driving a resilient business model that can adapt to
a lower-carbon economy.

We believe that this involves not only climate knowledge, but also experience driving large business transformations and constructive management of stakeholders like governments and regulators, as well as NGOs and activists.

We will continue to engage with Woodside on its climate transition strategy and have expressed our key asks with the company in terms of improved disclosure and enhancements to its decarbonisation strategy.