Fashion body scales up cotton farming carbon initiative | Impact Investor

A programme aimed at cutting emissions from cotton farming is expanding its activities in core countries India and the US, with plans to reach over 90,000 farmers in coming years.

The Unlock Programme, a fashion industry-backed initiative that aims to decarbonise cotton production, has said that, following a 2023 pilot, it plans to scale up its activities, with more than 10,000 cotton farmers enrolled across India and the US for the current year.

Launched by French president Emmanuel Macron at a G7 meeting in 2019, the programme has been developed by industry group The Fashion Pact and sustainability consultancy 2050 to provide on-the-ground support and financial incentives to help farmers adopt less environmentally harmful agricultural practices.    

The Fashion Pact is a global initiative of some 60 companies, which it says represent more than one third of fashion industry. Members have committed to mitigating climate change, restoring biodiversity and protecting the oceans. They include Adidas, Burberry, Gap, Giorgio Armani, H&M, Zara-owner Inditex and J. Crew among other well-known firms. 

The programme’s management is now being transferred to Future Earth Lab, a UK-based sustainable development NGO founded in 2023. The Fashion Pact will continue to provide support.

Eva von Alvensleben, The Fashion Pact’s executive director, said decarbonisation of supply chains was one of the largest challenges for the fashion sector, but while many fashion businesses were setting ambitious climate goals, many lacked a clear path to financially support this transition. At the same time, apparel producers, located mainly in the Global South were bearing a disproportionate share of the cost of adapting to lower impact raw material production.

“The way the system is set up today does not allow for individual brands to make change. This is where collective leadership is needed to support an industry-wide shift and increase incentives for lower impact cotton production,” she said.

Von Alvensleben said the Unlock Programme provided a collective financing mechanism with the potential to transform the way the sector operated and to share the cost of decarbonisation.

Financial incentives 

Under the initiative, fashion brands can buy so-called “Unlock Units” which are issued to cotton farmers to reflect the impact on greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions resulting from changes to their farming practices. By financially rewarding farmers directly for GHG reduction measures, the system is intended to incentivise them to invest in further improvements, as well as making the scheme attractive to others.

Unlock has been working with partners to provide support on farming practice change and on certification, including Organic Cotton Accelerator, Better Cotton, Indigo Ag, Climate Beneficial Verification Programme, Staple Cotton Cooperative Association, Carolinas Cotton Growers Cooperative and the Albini Group.

Among the key challenges it identifies for some farmers that the programme seeks to address are a lack of incentives and structures for data capture and data sharing, the need for more feedback on effective decarbonisation strategies for production, and financial or training barriers to adopting new approaches and technologies.

Ambitious plans

Pilot activities carried out in 2023, in which 25 fashion companies participated, led to the equivalent of 200-600 kilograms of carbon reductions per hectare in India, and 2,000kg of carbon reductions per hectare in the US, according to Unlock.

The scale up of the programme to include over 10,000 cotton farmers in India and the US, could achieve at least 10,000 tonnes of total emissions reductions and removals and up to €1.2m of payments to farmers in 2024, if this new phase matches or betters the outcome of the pilot, according to Unlock. The initiative plans to broaden the programme to include over 90,000 farmers and include more countries “within the next few years”.

Unlock said it had developed a detailed GHG quantification methodology, data collection and verification system that could adjust to “the most challenging rural smallholder contexts to ensure maximum participation”. 

The programme is also introducing mechanisms to quantify biodiversity, water and soil health to run alongside the emissions certification, which Unlock said would ensure the programme supported farmers’ livelihoods, as well as carbon reductions.

Certification system

Fashion firms are incentivised to buy the Unlock Units because they can include them in their inventories for hard-to-measure Scope 3 emissions. These are emissions produced across company supply chains, as opposed to Scope 1 emissions, which are those created directly by the firms themselves, or  Scope 2 emissions, which are those produced by generating power to run their operations.

Unlock said its certification system is designed to align with best practices on emissions claims and reporting, so that participating companies can include the units when striving to hit reductions targets under mechanisms such as the EU’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive’s (CSRD) or the Science-Based Targets initiative (SBTi).

The programme is intended to be sector agnostic, allowing it to be replicated for other crops and materials. Unlock said its next step would be to investigate how its processes could be applied to crops grown in rotation with cotton, allowing full industry engagement across different supply chains and supporting farmers throughout their crop rotation.