Climate-focused investor: Weis not ‘adequately assessing climate change’s impacts to its supply chain’
HARRISBURG, Pa. (WHTM) — The leader of a firm that invests in companies and pressures them to improve their records on social issues — and which owns a stake in Weis Markets — says the supermarket chain isn’t taking climate change seriously enough.
“Climate change doesn’t just threaten, for example, Weis’s stores in Pennsylvania,” said Matt Prescott, president of The Accountability Board, which owns Weis shares and wants shareholders to approve a resolution that would require the company to explain what the investment firm considers a less serious stance on climate change than the stances taken by some other supermarket chains. “It threatens the company’s supply chain, from all corners of the world. And it doesn’t seem to us like the company is fairly and adequately evaluating those risks and disclosing them and taking steps to mitigate them.”
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News of the shareholder resolution was first reported by biznewsPA. A copy of the resolution is below.
The Weis family owns a majority of shares in the company, and Prescott conceded there’s little chance the resolution would pass. He said other major American supermarket chains like Walmart, Kroger and Albertsons have gone further in disclosing the risks climate change poses to their businesses and planning to address those risks.
Central Pennsylvania’s other major supermarket chain, Carlisle-based Giant, is a unit of the Dutch-Belgian company Ahold Delhaize, which is regulated differently from American companies and whose regulatory disclosures — Prescott conceded — are thus impossible to compare with those of the U.S.-based companies.
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Prescott said The Accountability Board invests in more than 100 companies and engages “monitoring and tracking those companies’ performance and compliance with various commitments that they’ve made and various — what we would consider to be highly consequential and material social issues like climate change, the treatment of animals, diversity and so on.”
Sunbury-based Weis didn’t immediately reply to an abc27 News request for comment.
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