Is Fashion Ready for Climate ‘Crunch Time'?

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3 days ago

'We are playing Russian roulette with our planet,' United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres warned at the American Natural History Museum in New York City last month, citing a World Meteorological Organization that predicted even more record-breaking temperatures over the next five years. 'We need an exit ramp off the highway to climate hell.'
The traffic metaphor could not have been more apt. With extreme heat currently gripping vast swathes of the United States and Europe, subjecting tens of millions of people to dangerous temperatures far above what is usual for this time of year, even Germany's famed autobahn is buckling under the strain, requiring emergency repairs. Over in Greece, mandatory work breaks have been imposed in parts of the country where temperatures are expected to exceed 104 degrees Fahrenheit. On Monday, scientists said that the Fourth of July flash floods in Texas that killed at least 100 people—27 of them children and counselors from a summer camp—were caused by 'very exceptional meteorological conditions' that could not be explained by natural variability alone.
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If humanity still has 'control of the wheel,' as Guterres said, it may not be for long. Despite having 'what we need to save ourselves,' he said, referring to technologies that can slash emissions and protections that can safeguard carbon-absorbing forests, wetlands and oceans, 'the battle to limit temperature rise to 1.5 degrees will be won or lost in the 2020s—under the watch of leaders today.' The global financial system must be part of the climate solution, too, he added. Right now, for every dollar needed to adapt to extreme weather, only roughly five cents is available.
Fashion, a trillion-dollar industry, could also be accused of distracted driving under these conditions. While major brands such as Adidas, H&M Group, Lululemon, Zara owner Inditex and even Shein show 'promising signs of improvement' in their climate strategies, even raising their ambitions, according to a sectorial deep dive by the NewClimate Institute and Carbon Market Watch in June, their credibility is being thwarted by limited transparency on implementation plans, a reliance on problematic substitutions and a failure to shift completely away from the fast fashion business model.
'You can't only set targets,' said Benja Faecks, expert on global carbon markets at Carbon Market Watch, which is based in Brussels. 'You also need to substantiate them with measures. For the fashion sector, one of the biggest things is that you need to electrify your supply chain. And while all the companies are talking about how renewable energy is needed, there's almost no talk about how other processes that are not yet electrified need to be electrified.'
Among those so-called 'false solutions,' the report said, is replacing coal with biomass as a power source. Companies like H&M and Inditex say they are sourcing biomass with the lowest risk of adverse impact to help bridge efforts where barriers such as unreliable grid connections make transitioning to renewable energy difficult. Faecks said, however, that doing so doesn't substantially reduce emissions and, instead, risks locking in carbon-intensive technologies. Unbundled, stand-alone renewable energy certificates, or RECs, are another problem. Two decades of REC procurement, meant to help finance new renewable energy projects, have mostly failed to create additional capacity on the grid, creating a 'misleading narrative' about progress, she added.
Faecks said that it's the same with overproduction. Despite increasing industry chatter about the need to curtail the constant churn, no company has set measurable targets to do so. Rather than changing tack, Faecks said, businesses are still leaning on overproduction as a default strategy, creating tens of millions of metric tons of textile waste every year as a direct consequence. There's a climate corollary, too: One 2020 McKinsey study estimated that reducing the quantity of pre-consumer unsold clothing by 10 percent through more efficient supply chains and more accurate forecasting tools could reduce industry-wide emissions by 9 percent by 2030. It's why the French legislature is embracing new rules that could regulate fast fashion's even speedier counterpart, emblematized by Shein.
'And it's not only for household brands like H&M and Inditex, but also for Gucci, Prada and the higher-value brands that are overstimulating customer demands,' Faecks said. 'So I think we need a rethinking of what fashion is, and how we can go from cradle to grave without exceeding planetary boundaries.'
Other key transitions listed by the NewClimate Institute and Carbon Watch report—lower-impact fibers and low-emission logistics—have likewise seen middling progress, though not to the extent that they could be accurately referred to as 'transitions,' she said.
A more recent McKinsey study found that nearly two-thirds of clothing and footwear purveyors are behind on their 2030 decarbonization goals, with many shunting sustainability down their list of priorities and scaling back their commitments by pushing back or rescinding their net-zero targets. Only 18 percent of fashion executives ranked sustainability as a top-three risk to growth in 2025 versus 29 percent in 2024, it noted.
Global Fashion Agenda CEO Federica Marchionni alluded to this at the Global Fashion Summit in Copenhagen last month, where she said that the only certainty in an uncertain world is and will be climate change. But the cold calculus is that companies, ponying up more for, say, the Trump White House's increased tariffs, will see thinner profit margins with less wiggle room for long-term investments bearing less tangible returns.
'As we adapt, countries and communities must be supported to respond to current and future climate change impacts,' she said. 'As fashion is contributing to the climate crisis, too, it must not only mitigate its environmental impact but also support value chain adaptation to build long-term resilience.'
It's not only brands that bear responsibility, Faecks said, but also standard setters such as the GHG Protocol and the Science Based Targets initiative, which could require transition alignment targets to better shepherd companies. Regulatory interventions are similarly crucial because otherwise companies would only be guided by voluntary initiatives.
One problem, she said, is that there's too much finger-pointing about who's to blame for the current predicament and too little seizing of the reins. This phenomenon could worsen as companies face more existential issues—immediate-term financial health, for one—amid proliferating economic and geopolitical challenges that make the material risks of global warming feel, well, less material.
'You could also say that it's the consumer's responsibility to demand fewer clothes,' she said. 'So I think instead of shifting the blame, it's important to take leadership. Brands do have a role to play in engaging their suppliers. There are whole policy papers on how supplier engagement should work and should be encouraged. But without real frameworks and regulations, this game of blaming will continue.'
A just transition?
If fashion's climate plans are riddled with half measures, there's at least one area with a massively missing element: its workers. A June report by the Business & Human Rights Resource Center, which is headquartered in London and New York, found that while more than half of the 65 brands it examined have made commitments to reduce supply chain emissions by 2030, not one target involves engaging with or mitigating the impact on workers. Of the seven companies with the most ambitious climate goals, just one—Inditex—has a public climate transition plan that mentions workers. This despite the fact that climate breakdown will disproportionately impact garment-producing hubs in the global South.
That no brand has laid out a stand-alone 'just transition' policy—defined by the United Nations as 'leaving no person or country behind'—came as a surprise to Natalie Swan, labor rights program manager at BHRRC. She had assumed, going in, that it would have been an overutilized term, considering how often it's bandied about.
'I don't think that it is acceptable for a fashion company, or any business for that matter, to have ambitious decarbonization targets and not link workers intrinsically to a just transition,' she said. 'There is shared prosperity around this: there are rights holders along supply chains who are making the clothes that brands are selling, who absolutely have skin in the game on what a transition looks like.'
Not mentioning workers beyond a throwaway line about engaging with stakeholders is a 'wilful omission,' she said. Speaking to workers in Bangladesh and Cambodia, it was clear to her that they understand the climate emergency and the implications thereof, including how the growing use of new technologies or machinery could dramatically alter their employment landscape without reskilling or upskilling support.
'Their expertise was absolutely palpable on what the impact of heat was in factories, what they needed to feel safe at work and at home, and what they saw as the vision for a genuinely 'green' factory, rather than just an LEED-certified one,' Swan said. Existing heat standards for workplaces are vague, pithy, non-existent or subject to lax oversight regimes that render any modicum of guidance just a hair's breadth above meaningless.
Workers are also the ones bearing the brunt of extreme heat and flooding that can create operational disruptions and drive respiratory illnesses, cardiac issues and infectious diseases. Between March and April, for instance, members of the Tamil Nadu Textile and Common Labour Union reported temperatures between 95 and 113 degrees Fahrenheit in garment factories across the South Indian state, or far above what a human body can reasonably tolerate under industrial conditions. If brands propel the transition with the current status quo of supply chain inequality 'baked in,' they will only perpetuate the 'unjust and self-defeating' power differential that undergirds current production systems by ignoring the people on the frontlines, she added.
'There is an opportunity—a business opportunity—to have a shared agenda and vision for what the future of fashion means,' Swan said. 'It's an absolute requirement because these rights holders will be at increased risk if international brands don't engage with workers and their representatives. They're not outside their business models. They're within and critical to their business models.'
Even 'stakeholder engagement' can mean very different things to different people. Swan broke it down: 'Does it mean utilizing worker voice technology? Does it mean having a conversation with a few individual workers along your supply chain? Does it mean having a conversation with participation committees that do not make up stakeholder engagement, particularly when you do have the ability to have unionized workforce forces along your supply chains?'
Writing in an article that BHRRC published last month, labor campaigners Nandita Shivakumar and Apekshita Varshney recounted how one factory employee told them that brands are writing their sustainability policies in air-conditioned rooms at 68 degrees Fahrenheit for people working in 104-degree Fahrenheit heat. Workers aren't asking for luxuries, they said, just the 'bare minimum to survive,' such as cold drinking water, a functioning fan for every five to 10 people and clean bathrooms to rinse off their sweat.
'The cost of meeting these needs is negligible,' they wrote. 'The question is not about affordability: it's about willingness.' Brands, investors and multi-stakeholder initiatives, they said, must recognize heat stress as a human rights issue and incorporate it into human rights due diligence, occupational safety and climate adaptation plans. Equally important, they must share the financial burden of adaptation by funding infrastructure improvements, particularly for low-margin suppliers.
Back in New York City, Guterres described the present as the 'moment of truth' for climate action. Because every fraction of a degree of global heating counts, amounting to the 'difference between minimizing climate chaos or crossing dangerous tipping points,' now is the time to mobilize, act and deliver, he said.
'Our planet is trying to tell us something, but we don't seem to be listening,' Guterres said. 'It's climate crunch time. The need for action is unprecedented but so is the opportunity—not just to deliver on climate, but on economic prosperity and sustainable development.'
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