As the world continues to barrel toward 2030, now merely four years away, Beth Jensen, chief impact officer at Textile Exchange, is clear-eyed about one thing: Short of some miraculous breakthrough, the multi-stakeholder organization is “not on track” to meet its goal of slashing greenhouse gas emissions from fiber and raw material production by 45 percent.
“2026 will be a good moment for us to do a bit of a stock-take on this target, looking more deeply at the data and state of play of key interventions—for example, regenerative agriculture and textile-to-textile recycling—and what is realistic yet still aspirational to achieve by 2030 and 2035,” she said.
Ten years after the landmark Paris Agreement promised to avert the most catastrophic effects of global warming, the fashion industry’s formerly bullish outlook on checking its share is fading fast. Stoked by mounting polyester usage, clothing production’s emissions grew by 7.5 percent in 2023 to nearly 944 million metric tons, the first significant uptick since the Apparel Impact Institute, a nonprofit that funds and deploys decarbonization solutions, started crunching the numbers in 2019.
But at a time when temperatures couldn’t be hotter or the stakes higher, even the most earnest of ambitions appear to be beating a slow if steady retreat as the economic and geopolitical landscape turns increasingly hostile.
Certainly, evidence of brands “quiet quitting” sustainability was evident at last month’s United Nations climate summit in Belém, Brazil, where representation on the ground was thin. Rachel Kitchin, senior corporate climate campaigner for fashion and IT at Stand.earth, a Canadian environmental watchdog group, would use another term to describe this state of affairs: disappointing.
“I didn’t identify any brands attending in person, and very limited inclusion in official discussions or side events,” Kitchin said of the meeting colloquially known as COP30. “Stand.earth and Oxfam in Bangladesh hosted one of the only fashion sector-focused events with a focus on financing for a just transition.”
For her, this signaled a real problem. In a year when Paris Agreement signatories are submitting the updated climate plans known as nationally determined contributions, Kitchin said, “corporate action needs to be aligned with national targets. Instead, “fashion is way behind the curve and heading in the wrong direction when it comes to climate,” she added.
COP30 is a “complex, global negotiation” but at its heart is a “simple, devastating reality,” which is that everyone deserves the right to a livable future, said Liv Simpliciano, head of policy and research at Fashion Revolution, the global advocacy group that has been publishing an annual “What Fuels Fashion” report, the most recent of which criticizes the majority of the sector for continuing to rely on oil, gas and coal when “decarbonization wins” like industrial heat exist.
“What makes the industry’s slow pace so hard to justify is that we already have the evidence, the solutions and the skills to act across the entire value chain,” she said. “Of course, technical solutions alone are not enough. Brands must pair them with policy advocacy, appropriate finance and genuine inclusion of workers and suppliers. The path forward could not be clearer. Failing to move with urgency in spite of all this knowledge is, frankly, indefensible.”
Business as usual
None of this is news for the people working in the space. As diplomats, heads of state and heads of governments from across the world—sans the United States—descended upon the edge of the Amazon, the UN Fashion Industry Charter for Climate Action, an initiative that commits its 70 signatories to more than a dozen climate action requirements, published a communiqué urging lawmakers to use policy reform to increase renewable energy access, strengthen carbon reporting requirements, mobilize climate financing mechanisms and promote adaptation efforts.
Doing so, the letter said, would help signatories accelerate their ability to phase out fossil fuels, facilitate a just and effective clean energy transition, improve transparency and accountability, and bolster business resilience, particularly in vulnerable regions.
“It was a group of brands and manufacturers that came together and pulled that up,” said Lindita Xhaferi-Salihu, initiatives lead at the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, which convened the Fashion Charter in 2018 to rally stakeholders from disparate parts of the supply chain to move toward net-zero emissions by 2050.
“I think what we’re seeing now, based on these seven years of convening the charter, is that it feels like companies are kind of stuck because this is where the big transformation investments need to happen,” she added. “And in 2025, we’re no longer talking about commitments. We need to talk about implementation, and we need to be very concrete about the things that we’re doing and what they’re delivering.”
While Xhaferi-Salihu said that the charter’s job is “not to do the work for the industry but rather convene it,” as well as normalize conversations around hot-potato topics like the buyer-supplier relationship, Ruth MacGilp, fashion campaign manager at the U.K. nonprofit Action Speaks Louder questioned if its “general global points” would lead to the specific policy outcomes it desired without more strategic action, such as H&M Group, Nike and others’ lobbying for Vietnam’s recently enacted direct power purchase agreement policy, which will allow more suppliers to power their factories with renewable energy.
There are other ways brands can put skin in the game: In September, H&M Foundation, the philanthropic vehicle funded by H&M Group’s founding family, pledged 53 million Swedish kroner, or $5.6 million, over five years, to innovation platform Fashion for Good’s Future Forward Factories, beginning with an Arvind-backed plant in India that will install a mix of best-in-class technologies and emergent-but-tested solutions that capable of collectively cutting Tier 2 material production emissions by as much as 93 percent.
And in 2023, Bestseller, supported by H&M Group, promised to underwrite the $100 million required to get Bangladesh’s first utility-scale offshore wind project off the ground, which would help increase the availability of renewable energy in the world’s second-largest exporter of clothing.
But such endeavors are sporadic and isolated. In a rejoinder to the communiqué, Action Speaks Louder, Fashion Revolution and Stand.earth wrote that if business as usual continues, fashion’s emissions could top 1.24 billion metric tons in 2030.
Meanwhile, fashion continues to spin its wheels over buzzwords like “collective action” and “industry alignment.” Over the summer, Global Fashion Agenda, the Danish think tank behind the Global Fashion Summit, released a Fashion Impact Toolkit with business consultancy Deloitte that seemed extraneous at best. Last month, The Fashion Pact, a CEO coalition launched by French President Emmanuel Macron in 2019, touted an “optional and non-exhaustive questionnaire” for suppliers in Italy on what environmental data they deem most relevant—even though other tools and frameworks are already addressing reporting fatigue on a larger scale. Even the Fashion Charter’s missive is riddled with good intentions that may or may not translate into meaningful progress, MacGilp said.
“I think we have to differentiate between brands using sustainability as a marketing tool and using it as a business strategy in their sourcing decisions and strategic decisions,” she said. “We have loads of initiatives, loads of targets, loads of calls for collaboration, but up until very recently, there was never any dollar amount connected to these various commitments and initiatives, and most brands still don’t share any level of detail about that.”
The funding gap
It may sound simplistic to say that the industry’s biggest gap is money, but the fact remains that decarbonizing supply chains doesn’t come cheap. Neither has it been easy to get companies to shell out. Between 2018 and 2024, Aii’s Fashion Climate Fund mustered only 7.8 percent of the $2 billion it hoped to unlock—despite contributions from H&M Foundation, H&M Group, Lululemon, the PVH Foundation, Target and The Schmidt Family Foundation. In terms of overall emissions cuts since its inception, Aii has only achieved 8.6 percent of its goal.
Xhaferi-Salihu said it’s time to bring the chief financial officers of the world into the conversation to talk about what funding solutions could look like. There’s a tendency to involve sourcing people or sustainability people, but “if there’s no finance, nothing will happen,” she said. The Fashion Charter itself is in flux. Next year, there’s a plan to include stronger references to equity and just transitions, and to give commitments such as climate transition plans more bite.
“I think we need a new mindset, and that mindset has to be about implementation,” she said. “I think if we don’t deliver much more in the coming four years, then it’s going to be pretty difficult, if not impossible, for the industry to decarbonize.”
Money infuses every aspect of the supply chain, said Kitchin. Besides financing green solutions like renewable energy, clean heat and energy efficiency, brands need to pay fair prices for their products and, in turn, ensure that the garment workers making their products receive a fair wage. On top of that, they also need to be transparent about “what they’re paying versus loaning, and what the impact of it has been,” she added. “And they need to actively contribute to specific adaptation funds like worker insurance for days when factories are closed or they can’t work because of climate-driven weather extremes.”
For Cara Schulte, a researcher at Climate Rights International, it’s clear that garment workers are increasingly worse off as temperatures continue to climb, yet they often receive the least amount of consideration. The California-based climate and human rights monitoring and advocacy group recently followed up a report on the effects of increasing heat stress in Bangladesh with one that zooms in on Pakistan, where temperatures, too, now regularly surpass 40 degrees Celsius, or 104 degrees Fahrenheit.
Despite Pakistan’s somewhat stronger regulations in terms of controlling indoor temperatures, she said, the experience of workers was “largely the same”: fainting, dizziness, blurry vision, nausea, muscle cramps, rapid heart rates, irritability, fatigue, an overwhelming sense of being suffocated by the thick, still air.
“That suggests that this is really an issue with the way the industry works, and with brands and suppliers more broadly, and not necessarily a Bangladesh-specific issue,” Schulte said. Of the 12 buyers that CRI looked at, many of them signatories of the Pakistan Accord, only Next offered detailed heat protection guidelines. H&M Group said it plans to introduce heat guidance in the coming year that takes “local legal limits for maximum temperature for working into account,” which Pakistan has yet to do. Schulte wants to see the renegotiated Pakistan Accord, which is currently being hammered out, tackle extreme heat as an occupational health issue, much like fire and building safety.
“To date, the Accord has addressed heat-stress concerns, such as drinking water quality and extreme temperatures, through our complaints mechanism,” a spokesperson from the International Accord secretariat said. “We are now working to integrate heat-stress issues more systemically within our inspection and remediation program, including developing a dedicated protocol to ensure the issue is addressed in a structured and preventive manner within the Pakistan Accord and other Accord country programs going forward.”
That World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom affirmed that “the climate crisis is a health crisis” at COP30 is something that Schulte found heartening. Climate adaptation for health is already embedded in the Paris Agreement and “must be implemented,” he added.
“Climate and health have long been an issue, but I think where we grab attention is when people start to feel that it’s relatable,” Schulte said. “It’s less of an abstract issue when you can relate it to human health outcomes. I think that’s where we’ll start to see movement and garment workers would obviously fall under that.”
A lived reality
Heat stress aside, regulators should treat floods as health hazards, too, according to a new policy brief by Cornell University’s ILR Global Labor Institute, which previously laid out in the starkest of terms how much climate breakdown will cost the apparel industry.
Intense rainfall caused by Cyclone Ditwah in Sri Lanka—a major apparel production hub—has, to date, killed more than 600 people and driven 170,000 others into relief centers, according to the country’s Disaster Management Centre. Indonesia, Thailand and Malaysia have also been badly hit by floods and landslides from recent storms.
For garment workers who are already struggling to stretch their poverty pay on top of having to deal with wage theft and overwork, stronger, more frequent extreme weather events fueled by climate change can easily launch them into a full-fledged humanitarian crisis, said Abiramy Sivalogananthan, regional coordinator for South Asia at the Asia Floor Wage Alliance, a labor-led coalition across the continent’s garment-producing countries.
“In Asia, climate change is no longer a forecast—it’s a lived reality,” she said. “And garment workers, who stitch resilience into every seam, are the first to feel its harshest impacts.”
Has fashion focused too much on mitigation at the expense of adaptation? Historically, yes, Simpliciano said. Mitigation has dominated the agenda, while adaptation has been treated as secondary, even as workers are already experiencing life-threatening conditions on and off the production floor.
Take a June report by the Business & Human Rights Resource Center. The London and New York-headquartered nonprofit found that while more than half of the 65 brands it examined have made commitments to reduce supply chain emissions by 2030, not one single target involves engaging with or mitigating the impact on workers. Among the seven companies with the most ambitious climate goals, only one—Zara owner Inditex—has a public climate transition plan that mentions workers
“Ultimately, adaptation cannot be an afterthought,” Simpliciano said. “It must be worker-led, and it must run alongside mitigation efforts. That means brands funding cooling infrastructure, working with workers and unions to establish robust heat-stress protections and co-designing transition plans with workers from the outset. Anything less risks leaving those on the frontlines to bear the brunt of a crisis they did not create.”
The industry has more blind spots. Methane, a gas that can trap more than 80 times as much heat as carbon dioxide over two decades, has received scant attention from brands. Deforestation, another “big underground emissions driver,” is also spottily engaged with, said Kitchin.
“With COP30 having taken place in Brazil, it’s right to focus on the impact of leather on the planet, which is a big driver of both methane and deforestation, and which brands are not doing enough to stop,” she said.
Jensen said that Textile Exchange will be looking at the other side of the climate “coin”—nature—and building what she hopes will be a first-of-its-kind industry approach to measuring nature impacts and, potentially, setting nature-related targets.
“Honestly, I think a significant blind spot right now is actually the continued focus solely on climate impacts in so many discussions, including much of the broader messaging I’ve seen coming out of COP30,” she said. “A handful of leading organizations in the fashion and apparel industry are advocating strongly for consideration of nature-related impacts alongside climate, but this thinking is not yet widespread enough—either within our industry or beyond—to have become mainstream.”
At the Global Labor Institute’s mostly closed-door conference on the trade-labor connection in New York City on Thursday, Jason Judd, its executive director, lamented the glacial progress on enforcing rules on workplace heat in the global South.
“Why so slow?” he asked. “We can discover the temperature and humidity levels in inside factories. We can cost the systems required to bring the temperature down. We can estimate the return on investment on these cooling systems. This is not a technical problem but a political one.”
MacGilp has an answer, one that cuts across fashion’s lollygagging on climate issues overall. In a word, capitalism.
“It’s quarterly results, it’s planning no further than five to 10 years,” she said. “I think, unfortunately, the moral argument hasn’t worked, and eventually it will be, not by design, but by disaster, that these companies have to turn things around because the impacts of the climate crisis will impact their supply chain resilience. But we don’t have to wait for perfect policy conditions to roll the widely available solutions out. A leading brand—a smart brand—would be taking advantage of that.”