Jupiter joins chorus of Barclays investors seeking climate action. The bank must listen to its shareholders

Big money managers are increasingly aware of the risks climate change presents to their businesses. The earth is slowly moving

Greenpeace has been pressing Barclays to stop funding the climate emergency. Investors are increasingly doing the same thing (Greenpeace)

More trouble at the mill for Barclays.

Ahead of the bank’s AGM, Jupiter Asset Management, one of its top 25 shareholders, has announced that it plans to back a shareholder resolution calling on the bank to phase out providing financial services such as lending to fossil fuel companies and utilities that fail to align with goals of the 2015 Paris climate agreement.

This is a highly significant move.

Jupiter is fairly middle of the road when it comes to UK fund managers.

It’s not a corporate governance stick in the mud. It will use its voting power and take stances. But it’s not an ethical investment boutique and nor would you group it with, say, a Hermes, or one of the other more cutting edge institutional investors on the subject of climate change.

It wasn’t one of the 11 big investors that signed up to the resolution at the outset, when campaigning group ShareAction was shaking the trees and looking for supporters, either.

Its decision to offer its support now is thus significant, all the more so because the resolution isn’t one of those wooly ones that call for more disclosure. It demands that Barclays takes concrete action to change its business.

This could be seen as further evidence of the way the ground is shifting in the investment community.

Fund managers are increasingly seeing climate change as a business risk, one that will hurt them by wreaking economic damage and crimping returns. They are starting to take it very seriously and are thus demanding that investee companies take it very seriously.

Resolutions like this one rarely win, although sooner or later the dam will break.

Even if it doesn’t this time, a significant vote in favour will still send a powerful message to Barclays’ board, which has come up with the usual guff about listening to shareholders in response to the move, and whomever is appointed to fill the roll of chief executive when Jes Staley departs.

Behind the scenes, the bank has quietly argued that it should be compared with a US, rather than a European peer group, because it is a transatlantic investment bank.

That won’t wash. It simply says, look, our peer group is ok with mucking up the planet so you should let us carry on too. Its a specious and short term argument.

The bank also needs to wake up to the fact that while European money managers are ahead of the curve when it comes to the climate crisis, there have been tentative signs that American ones are belatedly starting to wake up.

It migth not be too long before they too are knocking on its doors and those of its chosen peer group.

Barclays is going to have to move eventually.

For the sake of its public image, it would be best advised to jump before it is pushed.