We examine the ability of socially responsible investment index to effect firms’ compliance with best practice regarding the management of climate change and the resultant impact on carbon emissions. We use a quasi-experimental setting involving an internationally diverse sample of public companies and show that the FTSE4Good’s engagement with the companies, reinforced by the threat of exclusion from that index, stimulates compliance. We find that the likelihood of the company adopting the required practices is positively associated with the difficulty of moving to compliance and expectations regarding the companies’ membership of the index, but adversely affected by concentrated equity ownership and by strong shareholder-oriented governance. Crucially our results offer preliminary evidence that compliance with climate change-related management practice is related to subsequent reductions in carbon emissions.