For the sixth year running, the Forum for Responsible Investment (FIR), France’s leading shareholder engagement association, has sent a series of written questions to every company in the CAC 40, France’s benchmark index of top listed companies, ahead of their annual general meetings. The FIR, which holds a stake in each of these companies, uses this exercise as a lever for active engagement, pushing on governance and sustainability practices for the long haul.
The 2025 campaign drew on 33 analysts from the FIR’s Engagement Committee, backed by 35 institutional investors with combined assets under management of €7.08 trillion.
The selected questions aren’t intended to cover every sustainability issue on the map. They zero in on the pressure points that matter most to investors: the ones that reveal whether a company’s business model is built to last.
What’s being assessed here isn’t public commitments. It’s whether companies can steer, arbitrate and govern their extra-financial trajectories.
1. Resource discipline: can the company make the hard call when growth comes at the expense of resources?
The underlying question is simple: do executives actually factor resource constraints into how they invest, produce and grow, or does sustainability remain a silo while core business decisions get made elsewhere?
The FIR’s 2025 campaign suggests most CAC 40 companies haven’t fully bridged that gap. Most reference energy efficiency or intensity-reduction efforts, but the focus stays on relative metrics, measured per unit produced or per unit of revenue, rather than absolute reductions in total resource consumption. The flaw in that approach is well documented: intensity can fall while overall impact keeps rising if volumes grow fast enough.
The highest-rated responses shared three characteristics:
- They tied resource discipline to capital allocation decisions
- They named the trade-offs they had actually made
- They connected resource targets to medium-term financial planning
For investors, resource discipline has become one of the sharpest tests of strategic rigour available. A company that can demonstrate it has genuinely wrestled with resource constraints, and embedded that thinking into its financial roadmap, signals awareness of the cost pressures ahead.
2. Value chain: does the company actually control social risk where value gets created?
Decent living standards across the value chain aren’t an abstract moral concern. They reflect a highly practical expectation from investors: pinpointing exactly where social risks could undermine the business model.
The FIR’s 2025 findings suggest most companies aren’t yet equipped to answer this question well. Scores here rank among the lowest of the entire campaign, particularly when companies are asked about:
- How much of the supply chain is actually covered
- Whether comparable indicators exist across that chain
- Whether impact can be measured beyond Tier 1 suppliers
That said, incomplete coverage isn’t necessarily disqualifying. Investors aren’t expecting perfection, they’re looking for a clear sense of priority: which parts of the chain carry the most social risk, what methodology is being applied and why, and what a credible improvement plan would look like.
The companies that score highest are honest about current limitations and can demonstrate they have a handle on the process. Vague, overly general statements, by contrast, read as a risk that nobody is managing.
3. ESG governance: is the board equipped to decide, not just oversee?
On the governance front, the FIR’s 2025 campaign surfaces an expectation that’s becoming harder to ignore: investors want to know whether the board can actually make the call on sustainability issues, not simply monitor them.
Most CAC 40 companies report having ESG expertise at board level. Answers get far less consistent, however, once you push on the details: what that expertise actually consists of, how current it is, and how much real influence it carries over major strategic decisions.
For investors, sustainability governance has become a credibility test for strategy. A board that isn’t properly equipped is seen as a weak point when navigating complex trade-offs – the climate transition, reshoring, divestment, portfolio repositioning, regulatory risk.
4. Artificial intelligence: is the company getting ahead of the systemic risks posed by the technology it deploys?
The FIR introduced a new, dedicated question on artificial intelligence this year — one of the clearest signals from the 2025 campaign that investors are redrawing the boundaries of what counts as sustainability.
The FIR notes that responses on this topic remain largely underdeveloped. Few CAC 40 companies currently have a formalised AI governance framework in place, let alone clearly documented oversight mechanisms. The gap between the pace of AI deployment and the maturity of governance around it is significant.
For investors, AI isn’t approached as a story about innovation. It’s assessed through the lens of reputational risk, future regulatory compliance, and the social sustainability of the models themselves.
Companies that stand out can clearly explain how AI is governed, folded into risk management, and connected to overall strategy.
Structure the story, strengthen the case
For financial, shareholder and investor communication teams, the challenge is no longer about being convincing. It’s about making the company’s capacity to steer legible and that’s where the credibility of sustainability commitments is actually won or lost with the markets today.
Resource discipline, value chain, ESG governance, artificial intelligence: these subjects now demand structured, well-argued, coherent answers able to withstand scrutiny from engaged institutional investors.
This is exactly where The Editorialist comes in. We work alongside financial, shareholder and investor communication teams to build credible, market-aligned extra-financial narratives.
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