Is Fashion’s Lack of Disclosure Hampering Climate Progress?

What fuels fashion? The short response is we don’t know.

Even clothing that’s touted as “sustainable” or “eco-friendly” is often the product of a manufacturing system stoked by coal, oil and natural gas. But the truth is, it’s tough to tell the virtues of one garment from the vices of another because so much is unknown, said Delphine Williot, policy and campaigns manager at Fashion Revolution, the advocacy group whose latest report both asks and attempts to answer that question.

While 58 percent of the world’s top 250 fashion purveyors publish their sustainable material targets—more recycled polyester, say, or a shift to regenerative cotton—only 11 percent divulge the energy mix that powers their supply chains. In other words, “we do not know what fuels fashion because the vast majority—95 percent—are not upfront about what fuel is used in their supply chains,” she said.

That such a foundational question lacks a proper answer while the planet continues to burn is maddening for campaigners like Williot. Both NASA and Copernicus, the European climate change service, declared July 22 the hottest day on Earth since recordkeeping began. It exceeded the previous holder, just one day earlier, by more than a tenth of a degree Fahrenheit. And for all their talk of a “clean” or “just” transition, there’s been a dearth of disclosure of how brands are financing supply chain decarbonization or protecting livelihoods from climate harms. It’s why Fashion Revolution decided to hold the industry accountable with a single-issue report, separate from its annual Fashion Transparency Index.

What the organization found was disappointing if not unsurprising. Despite the profusion of net-zero ambitions and emissions-reducing targets, fashion companies are “clearly completely unprepared at the moment to truly mitigate their environmental impact across their supply chains,” Williot said. Just a little over half (52 percent) of brands broadcast their Tier 1 factory lists, the report found. Even fewer declare the processing facilities where energy-intensive textile washing, dyeing and treatment occur.

Whether the lack of public information is due to brands playing their cards close to their chests or the result of ignorance are options with equally alarming ramifications. “It raises the question, can you map out your environmental risks if you do not know where you’re currently producing?” she asked. For companies that are aware but choose not to say, they’re robbing themselves of opportunities to collaborate with buyers they share production lines with, Williot said.

The knowledge deficit looms large in other areas. Though almost half (47 percent) of the brands Fashion Revolution looked at now disclose carbon reduction targets verified by the Science Based Targets Initiative, a 13 percent increase from the year before, just four—that would be Asics, H&M Group, Marks & Spencer and Patagonia—have carbon reduction targets that meet the level of ambition that the Paris Agreement has determined will forestall the worst effects of climate change.

Meanwhile, nearly one-quarter (24 percent) of the names reveal nothing about decarbonization, suggesting that the climate crisis hasn’t registered as a priority. More pointedly, 86 percent of the entire cohort lacks public, time-bound and measurable targets to phase out coal, which is not only the most carbon-intensive fuel available but also an almost intractable part of fashion production’s energy mix.

“There’s so little transparency looking at the overall carbon impacts of the fashion industry,” Williot said. “There’s so many figures going around—it may account for 2-8 percent of the global carbon footprint. But again, we don’t know, simply because the fashion industry is not currently backing up.”

Waiting for regulation—a lumbering beast at the best of times—to kick in, isn’t the answer. One issue is unequal access to renewable energy infrastructure in the global South, where the bulk of clothing production takes place. From Fashion Revolution’s vantage point, powerful buyers haven’t been exploiting their tremendous leverage to push for legislation that shores up solar or wind availability in countries like Bangladesh, Cambodia or Vietnam. Only 13 percent of the 250 brands offered evidence of renewable energy advocacy in their supply chains, the report said, and just 2 percent communicated the outcomes of those efforts.

Overproduction is something else an industry that has profited from fashion’s high turnover is keen to ignore, though there are embryonic moves to decouple profits from production through the use of circular business models such as resale and repair. Even so, the vast majority of companies—89 percent—fail to disclose how many products they pump out every year. Less than half of those specify the raw material emissions footprints of their SKUs, which further disconnects manufacturing from its environmental impact.

“I think we cannot realistically decarbonize the fashion industry if we cannot address the fact that the fashion industry is producing excessively,” Williot said. “We cannot realistically reduce the amount of energy that the industry is currently using if we simply don’t reduce the amount of clothes that we’re producing.”

Fashion Revolution wants to industry to put its money where its mouth has been. Extreme weather exacerbated by climate change could see leading garment-producing countries such as Bangladesh shed $65 billion in export earnings and 1 million new jobs by 2030. With only 3 percent of brands disclosing efforts to financially support workers affected by heatwaves, monsoons or droughts, the industry needs to provide compensation mechanisms, “not as charity but as a matter of justice.”

Suppliers also need financing, not debt, for infrastructure improvements such as solar panels, Williot said. Though initiatives like Fashion Pact’s Future Supplier Initiative, which facilitates low-interest loans, are “better than nothing,” yoking manufacturers with additional financial liabilities only perpetuates the existing power imbalances between buyers, suppliers and workers, she said.

“We have a very clear demand where we ask all brands to invest at least 2 percent of their revenues into financing that clean and just transition, to ensure that not only is there greater access and generation of renewable energy across their supply chain, but also ensuring that garment workers are not left behind,” Williot said. “We think it’s their responsibility to truly ensure that those impacts are mitigated and dealt with.”

But back to the question posed in the beginning: What fuels fashion? To find out, brands need to, at minimum, map and disclose 100 percent of their processing facilities, Fashion Revolution said. It isn’t even a matter of morality, either. As mandatory due diligence regulations like the European Union’s corporate sustainability due diligence directive, or CSDDD, are incorporated into member states’ laws, most companies won’t have a choice in the long run.

“It makes absolute sense from the financial perspective, too,” Williot said.