On Monday, the UN’s annual COP climate summit kicks off in the heart of the Amazon rainforest in Belém, Brazil; a lush setting that underscores what’s at stake if climate action fails to accelerate in a world growing hotter by the year.

The event marks a decade since world leaders reached an historic agreement in Paris to cap global heating, spurring governments, companies and investors to talk up the prospect of radical cuts to planet-warming emissions. Big fashion brands enthusiastically jumped on the bandwagon, announcing flashy pledges to curb their impact and launching industry initiatives they said would act as delivery mechanisms for their big ambitions.

Fast forward to today, things are not going well.

Global emissions are still rising and the past ten years have been the warmest on record, setting new record-breaking temperatures. To be sure, efforts made since the Paris Agreement have reduced how much scientists expect the world to heat by the end of the century, but not enough to prevent the planet from careening towards dangerous environmental tipping points.

For its part, the fashion industry is still off-track to hit targets set for 2030 and the stakes are higher than ever.

Rising temperatures are already fuelling more intense, more frequent and more deadly weather extremes, with devastating economic and human consequences. The COP summit is ostensibly a moment for countries and companies to redouble commitments and set more ambitious pathways for change. But the chances of a breakthrough this year are slim.

Attendance is expected to be lighter than usual, with several major world leaders skipping the summit altogether. The US, one of the world’s biggest polluters, is not sending a delegation amid a broader retreat from climate action. President Donald Trump has called climate change a “con job” and is withdrawing the country from the Paris Agreement.

The shifting political tone has hit fashion’s efforts, too. Especially when coupled with a wider backdrop of economic volatility. Withglobal ambitions slipping and executives preoccupied with trade wars, inflation and broader geopolitical uncertainty, simply maintaining the sustainability initiatives already underway is becoming more challenging.

“We’re still very far from being able to say the industry is on track to achieve its goals for 2030,” said Lindita Xhaferi-Salihu, who works with the fashion industry in her capacity as initiatives lead at the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. To change that, “something magical needs to happen in the next five years.”

Fashion’s Big Temperature Check

As the world heats up,fashion’s progress towards reducing its carbon footprint seems to be cooling down.

The industry’s emissions increased 7.5 percent in 2023, according to a report published by climate-focused industry nonprofit Apparel Impact Institute earlier this year. The increase, driven by a surge in polyester use and higher production volumes, is the most significant since 2019 when AII began calculating the sector’s emissions.

It’s an upward trend that continued into last year, said AII’s chief impact officer Kurt Kipka, citing work the organisation is currently doing to crunch more recent numbers. By the end of the decade,** **the sector’s emissions are expected to hit 1.19 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent, far above the 45 percent reduction from 2019 levels needed to keep them in line with the goals laid out in Paris.

(BoF)

Indeed, halfway to 2030, fashion’s climate promises are fraying and the gap between ambition and delivery is widening. Some companies have begun to rollback climate pledges, while many others have become much quieter on the topic.

The UN’s flagship fashion initiative, the Fashion Industry Charter for Climate Action, has seen participation drop from close to 150 companies to fewer than 70, according to Xhaferi-Salihu. Some left by choice, but others lost accreditation for failing to live up to the charter’s most basic requirements to set and report against emissions-reduction targets, she added.

To be sure, there are also pockets of progress. Many brands have made headway cutting emissions within their own operations, through measures like purchasing renewable energy to power their offices, warehouses, and retail stores. But the industry’s real challenge is curbing supply-chain emissions, where the bulk of its environmental impact takes place. Nearly two-thirds of brands are still failing to address this challenge, according to BoF and McKinsey’s 2024 State of Fashion report.

Progress among fashion’s biggest companies — and biggest polluters — is mixed. A handful of businesses, like H&M Group and Adidas, have begun to report meaningful absolute reductions in their carbon footprint, but others have seen more muted progress. Ultra-fast-fashion giant Shein’s supply-chain emissions have grown more than 10 percent since it set a goal to reduce them in 2023.

(BoF)

Progress to date has largely rested on moves to switch to lower-impact materials, coupled with efforts by suppliers to improve operational efficiency or boost their use of renewable energy. A push by signatories of the UN Fashion Charter to phase out polluting coal-fired boilers in their supply chains is also beginning to yield dividends.

But driving the next five years of more ambitious reductions is going to be harder. While many companies have yet to get started and there are plenty of quick wins that can be driven by cost-saving efficiency efforts, bending the curve on fashion’s emissions will require tackling more structural challenges.

For the most part, brands don’t own or work exclusively with their suppliers, creating barriers to funding the major investments needed to decarbonise factories. Suppliers for their part argue they should not be left to bear the costs of a problem big brands have pushed onto them, while continuing to extract most of the profits in the industry. Many smaller businesses in the sector would struggle to access financing for long-term decarbonisation projects with dubious returns anyway.

Meanwhile, accessing renewable energy isn’t easy in many large manufacturing countries, where grids often rely on heavily polluting fossil fuels. Sustainability goals and sourcing targets are misaligned and relationships with suppliers are often short term. Amid economic turbulence, many teams have been restructured, making it difficult to build long-term strategies. Meanwhile, pilot programmes intended to prove out opportunities to drive meaningful emissions reductions have yet to scale.

“We’ve been pushing the narrative of low-hanging fruit opportunities surrounding energy efficiency and process efficiency,” said Kipka. “The reality is that today, low-hanging fruit is not going to get us to this industry’s aspirations by 2030.”

The Messy, Costly Road Ahead

When India’s largest garment exporter, Shahi Exports, began phasing out coal in its textile mills in 2023, the company had little choice. Several of its largest customers had pledged to phase coal out of their supply chains by 2025. If Shahi didn’t make the switch, it risked losing their business, said sustainability and organisational development head Anant Ahuja.

The quickest path to get off coal was to move to biomass boilers, which burn agricultural waste or wood to generate heat. It wasn’t a simple change. Shahi’s textile mills relied on hundreds of tonnes of coal a day to run boilers that power vital washing and finishing processes. Switching to biomass required costly retrofits and investment to establish a new fuel supply chain.

But by December, the process should be complete, with substantial emission reductions starting to show up in the company’s data from next year. Ahuja’s hope is that the investment will be rewarded with more business from the customers that demanded it. But he’s still not sure it was the right move for the long term.

Many environmentalists see biomass as a stop-gap solution at best, afalse one at worst. Burning wood chips and agricultural waste still leads to carbon emissions and biomass plants have been associated with other forms of nasty air pollution. Murky supply chains have fuelled concerns that growing demand for biomass feedstock could intensify deforestation and compete with food crops for land, water and other resources.

Shahi had already been exploring alternatives, securing a $100,000 grant to study whether electric boilers could replace its coal-fired ones. The conclusion was sobering: while the technology worked, the return on investment stretched beyond ten years, far too long for an industry that lives on slim margins and operates at the speed of trend cycles. The company was looking into potential financing options when key clients began demanding it become coal-free by the end of 2025.

“We didn’t think we’d figure it out in a year, so all we could do was switch to biomass,” said Ahuja. “It’s unfortunate, because if there hadn’t been such an urgent push to phase coal out through biomass, we could have invested more time toward a longer-term solution.”

Shahi’s experience is a microcosm of the challenges facing the wider industry. The big swings needed to dramatically reduce fashion’s carbon footprint are expensive and the solutions that make economic sense today are often flawed. Opportunities also vary from country to country, depending on local policy frameworks and regional infrastructure capabilities.

Indeed, some of the changes that would help over the coming years are more political than practical. For instance, in countries like Vietnam and India, policy incentives for solar installations and renewable-energy procurement offer support to companies keen to accelerate their transitions. That’s not currently the case in other manufacturing hubs, like Bangladesh, where opportunities for large-scale solar deployment are more limited.

Meanwhile, few manufacturers have Shahi’s financial firepower. Many are small businesses that struggle with access to funding. Even for larger players with ready access to credit, it’s hard to justify investments in projects with long pay backs when most have only a season of visibility into their business pipeline. Some brands have launched initiatives to help support decarbonisation financing, but many climate advocates in the industry argue that a shift to more equal and long-standing sourcing partnerships would have the bigger impact.

“It’s never been clearer to me than it is right now,” said AII’s Kipka. “Longer term sourcing commitments, picking suppliers and committing will be the biggest unlock for this sector.”

The Elephant in the Room

Hong Kong-based manufacturer Epic Group’s head of sustainability Vidhura Ralapanawe has his career working on cutting the industry’s environmental footprint. But his bigger worry today is how to protect its workforce from fashion’s failure to deliver on its targets.

In countries like Bangladesh, where many of Epic’s factories are based, rising temperatures are making heat stress an increasingly frequent and pressing problem. Intensifying weather extremes are already hitting people and economies hard, with droughts, storms, and heat waves killing millions and causing major economic losses each year. Based on its current emissions trajectory, the world is on course “for a serious escalation of climate risks and damages,” according to the UN Environment Programme’s latest Emission Gap Report.

Built-in cooling systems will be vital for new factories, like the one Epic is building in India as a futuristic model for eco-manufacturing, Ralapanawe said. The buildings have a super-insulated shell, designed to keep interiors cool without heavy air conditioning. Elsewhere, though, factories will need to install energy-hungry air conditioning systems just to maintain safe working conditions.

“It’s going to blow my carbon targets out of the water,” said Ralapanawe. “We are struggling with decarbonisation… [but] this is the bigger problem.”

This challenge of adapting the industry for a more hostile climate is one fashion as a sector is only just beginning to grapple with. If anything, the obstacles are even more daunting than those presented by decarbonisation, with many necessary investments simply representing a cost and some locations much harder to chart a path to resilience than others. On the other hand, the cost of inaction is equally high, threatening both livelihoods and business security.

“It’s not just the greenhouse gas emissions that we need to be focusing on anymore, ” said Xaferi Salihu. “We need to make sure that people who fuel this industry are able to continue work and that we are creating a new industry that will be fit for the future.”