Can Fashion Still Meet Its Climate Promises?

As COP30 gets underway in Belém, a port city on the edge of the Brazilian rainforest, the mood is sober. A decade after the Paris Agreement was adopted internationally to limit global warming, many of the world’s largest fashion companies have fallen short on emissions cuts — and some are moving in the wrong direction, emitting pollutants at an even higher rate than in previous years.

In this episode of The Debrief, senior correspondent Sheena Butler-Young and executive editor Brian Baskin are joined by BoF reporters, Sarah Kent and Shayeza Walid, to examine why progress has stalled, how fast-fashion growth is reshaping the landscape, and what practical steps — from decarbonising supply chains to adapting factories to extreme heat — are needed next.

Key Insights: 

• Kent says, “I would not say any brand has a credible pathway right now to meet their targets for 2030,” “Even companies that have shown that they’re able to reduce their emissions to date, driving down their carbon footprint over the next five years is going to be harder, more complex and more costly… and really no one company can do that alone.”

• Kent highlights the industry’s deep structural bind: “The fundamental conflict at the heart of the fashion industry’s climate commitments is that you’ve got a business built on extracting stuff and producing stuff and selling stuff. The more stuff they sell, the better the business does, but the worse the environmental impact is,” “Profitability and sales growth are fundamentally at odds with the environmental commitments companies have made.”

• Short-term thinking still in the boardroom locks in higher climate impacts, adaptation costs and supply-chain risk. As Kent puts it, “On climate, if you don’t act, you don’t have to make these big investments, and you can keep growing your business and things will trundle along for some time. But the longer you wait to act, the worse the climate impacts you’re going to have to deal with are going to be, and the higher the cost of mitigating them, adapting to them, and trying to continue this business in a climate-constrained world.”

• Voluntary commitments aren’t enough at fast fashion’s scale. Walid points to Shein: “Shein’s case is very instructive. There’s limits to voluntary commitments, which is what the majority of these brands have made.” She continues, “When the business model is built on speed and volume… it just shows that voluntary commitments are maybe not enough for a fashion brand – especially a brand as big as Shein – to actually tangibly reduce its emissions when its entire business case doesn’t stand for that.”

• Climate impacts are now serious human and corporate risks. “It’s not just a corporate issue anymore,” says Walid. “People who have the visuals recognise the reality of what’s happening in these factories and the people who are making clothes at the end of the day.” Kent adds: “People who are suffering from heat stress are not as productive… floods are disruptive to production, to logistics, to supply chains. Just because we have not yet seen a major disruption to the apparel supply chain from these climate crises yet is more luck than anything else.”

Additional Resources:

• Can Fashion Still Meet Its Climate Promises? | BoF 
• The Frayed Edge: Is Fashion Quiet Quitting on Climate? | BoF 

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