At Textile Exchange’s annual conference in Lisbon in October, Christine Goulay, founder of Sustainabelle Advisory Services, brought up the 1992 bestseller by Gary Chapman titled “The Five Love Languages: How to Express Heartfelt Commitment to Your Mate.”
She entreated her audience to bear with her; despite the apparent non sequitur, this was relevant to the topic at hand: reaching decision-makers, the Kering veteran said. Ask a group of labor rights advocates how they define equity, and they might describe being fair and just. Pose the same question to a room of venture capitalists, and they’ll point to shareholder value. A marketing department, meanwhile, might think of brand equity. If sustainability progress is stalling, could it be because its advocates aren’t using the right love language?
“So we have to be really conscious of not only the words we’re using, but of the point of reference of the person that we’re talking to,” Goulay said. “I feel like we’ve been going to everybody—the legal team, the finance team—saying with our own love language, which is, ‘We have to do this; this is the right thing to do.’ And this can really work against us, because instead of winning them over, we could be making them defensive.”
That the Apparel Impact Institute’s latest report was released close to Valentine’s Day may have been a coincidence, but it spoke a particular brand of amour anyway. In it, the environmental nonprofit made one thing clear: When it comes to combating climate change, the sluggish pace of fashion as usual could result in less fashion altogether—a 34 percent profit loss by 2030 and up to 67 percent by 2040, in fact.
Was this tough love or simply money talking? A little of both, said Lewis Perkins, Aii’s president. For years, the organization has been drumming on about the roughly $1 trillion investment needed to fully decarbonize the apparel and footwear supply chain by 2050, with a midway target of halving emissions by 2030.
Yet Aii has struggled to achieve more than a handful of percentage points of its goal of eradicating 100 million metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions by the decade’s end. Its $250 million Fashion Climate Fund, which seeks to flag and finance verifiable carbon-reducing solutions, has so far raised only $70 million from the likes of HSBC, H&M Group, Lululemon and The Schmidt Family Foundation. What was once dismissed as a supplier grouse has become a truism: Everyone wants sustainability, but no one wants to pay for it.
It was during a workshop on Aii’s playbook for financing decarbonization a couple of years ago that Perkins realized company executives were speaking at cross-purposes with one another.
“We kept hearing things like, ‘But I can’t even make the case to my CFO that any of this is more than just throwing money down a well,’” he said. “Or, ‘with everything the company has to think about, my sustainability agenda isn’t even on the radar.’ Even strong, well-meaning sustainability teams with talented people struggle to get their companies to care enough. If they go in talking about doing the right thing or saving the planet, they’re going to get laughed out of the CEO’s office.”
Written in partnership with the business and technology consultancy Accenture, Aii’s new report on the cost of inaction offers purse-string holders a stout business case. (It’s also not for nothing that the publication uses direct pronouns like “you” and “your” to drive the message home to the target reader: the C-suite occupant.) From supply chain disruptions to regulatory compliance costs, the risks to the corporate bottom line are not only quantifiable, but they’re also increasingly evident.
“The volatility is already hitting companies today, and we’ll see more and more of that,” Perkins said, checking off increasing carbon, raw material and energy costs as the biggest drivers of losses in a company’s operating margin—as much as 3 percentage points in less than four years. Policy shifts, such as the European Union’s Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism, which effectively serves as a carbon tax on certain goods and materials entering the bloc, also loom ahead.
While there are “practical and investable” actions that, taken today, can reduce a business’s exposure—say, through electrification, renewable energy procurement or material sourcing strategies—equally important is a sense of shared accountability. Brands don’t typically operate their own factories, which adds another frisson to the debate over who foots the bill.
But a manufacturer’s access to financing is only one hurdle, said Kristina Elinder Liljas, Aii’s senior director of sustainable finance and engagement. China, for instance, has abundant green lending mechanisms that offer low-cost refinancing to banks that issue loans for improvements in clean energy and energy efficiency. Its 1,300 textile industrial parks, buoyed by the debut of a nationwide zero-carbon industrial park initiative in 2025, also provide more than 11,000 companies with shared infrastructure and governance platforms that distribute green transition costs. What is equally crucial, she said, is having a long-term brand buy-in that assures those investments pay off.
“Suppliers want to make sure there is security in terms of order intake at the other end,” Liljas said, adding that other barriers to success include gaps in technical capacity, awareness and planning tools and confusion over evolving requirements and which interventions to choose. “It boils down to trust, including between the supplier and buyer.”
Neither does geoeconomic instability lend itself well to big bets. When Aii launched the Fashion Climate Fund at the Global Fashion Summit in Copenhagen in 2022, the world was a markedly different place. President Donald Trump’s sweeping and rapidly changing trade policies over the past year have scrambled international alliances, added upward pressure on prices and sowed confusion and conflict amid escalating political stakes. What is the love language for that?
“What we see is a hesitancy to invest,” Liljas said. “Because why would you invest if suddenly tariffs go up tremendously, and then sourcing has to change? I think everyone’s on standby, which goes to show that long-term strategic political stability and regulations need to be there as a foundation for an investment to take place.”
Faint heart never won fair lady
Aii is making pivots of its own, including what it calls a “strategic realignment” of its Climate Solutions Portfolio grant program, introduced in 2023, to prioritize funding projects that accelerate the electrification of Tier 2 factories. This is so a grant project, which can be awarded up to $250,000, moves “beyond being a grant project and we can take things to the sector and we can really weave it into what we do on a day-to-day basis,” said Pauline Op de Beeck, the organization’s Climate Portfolio director.
Centering supplier-led applications also makes more sense because it means that any proposed technologies are more adoption-ready with partners that are already engaged. Manufacturers aren’t going to pilot innovations that will fail or otherwise muddle their operations, Op de Beeck said. Leveraging their high degree of due diligence is also a way to find projects that have a high likelihood of making it into Aii’s Deployment Gap Grant as vetted solutions.
“Ultimately, the innovation burden often lies with the supplier, and they are doing things for which no financial incentive exists,” she said. “So in order to encourage the implementation or the innovation that we think is going to have the most scalable impact, that has to be rewarded.”
The projects are often less than sexy. One of Op de Beeck’s current favorites, from India, involves switching from mineral to synthetic lubricants to curb energy losses through reduced friction, higher temperature stability and consistent viscosity maintenance.
“It’s really just switching oil types, which can be applied to any machine across Tier 1, 2 or 3,” she said. “And it’s a small change. But it’s also one that any facility can do, it’s inexpensive and it also saves money. Whereas some of our other, perhaps more innovative projects—like the hot water heat pumps, which are still ongoing—are capital-intensive and not everyone can do them yet. But it’s nice to see a range of carbon impacts from easier-to-implement to more advanced projects.”
The more challenging the technology, however, the greater the decarbonization rewards, especially at the Tier 2 or material processing stage, which accounts for up to 55 percent of fashion’s carbon emissions, Op de Beeck added.
“I think it’s quite clear to Aii that the most effective way to spend any brand budget, whether that’s investing in a startup or supporting your supplier with an implementation, is to focus on these factories,” she said. “There are obviously other tiers in the supply chain, there are materials, there is circularity—all of those things are important as well. But if we look at spending our money to get real impact and to get it fast by 2030 to be in line with our global goals, it has to be in wet-processing facilities.”
Though much ink has been spilled over whether the industry is in a so-called “sustainability retreat” or not, Perkins is seeing a movement to a “more covert climate action phase,” one that is becoming increasingly Balkanized between companies that are still committed and those that are not.
“We need everybody on board,” he said. “But frankly, if there were people that were just there because they wanted a good press release, they’re almost dumbing down the conversation and they’re not into action, maybe it’s OK that they’re not at the table right now. We can just focus on the people, because this kind of work is hard. It takes passion, it takes energy—literally.”
If Aii can get 10 “really great” companies and their supply chains, plus two banks, together to get some “big, high-impact projects across the finish line and then share with the world,” that “feels like better, strong momentum,” Perkins said.
And if nothing else, he added, the report should serve as a “wake-up call” to anyone who controls the money, whether it’s CFOs, boards or investors, because time is running out and every quarter of delay compounds costs. Or to put it another way, each investment bolsters resilience, but that requires proactive leadership and capital planning. The overall message? Climate inaction is a financial liability.
One sentence in it packs a particular punch: “Climate impacts may begin in your supplier base, but they will always arrive in full force on your balance sheet and your profit and loss.”
“It’s a shared risk because those costs are just going to roll back up again,” Perkins said. “We need more money, but that has to go hand in hand with longer-term brand commitments to stabilizing and de-risking. We’ve been talking about partnership for years. Is there equal partnership happening, where there’s co-investment in the future? Or are suppliers told what to do and then thrown out to the wind to figure it out? We need something in the middle.”
What is love, after all, without compromise?