Why Fashion’s Business As Usual ‘Won’t Cut It Anymore’ in Age of Climate Breakdown

Jason Judd, executive director of Cornell University’s ILR Global Labor Institute, recalled a conversation he recently had with a manufacturing executive who was building a new factory in northern India, complete with a state-of-the-art combination evaporative and refrigeration cooling system to help employees beat the heat during the balmy summer months.

There was just one problem. The model the engineers proposed maxed out at 37 degrees Celsius, or 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit. This past May, temperatures across several states in the region soared well past 110 degrees Fahrenheit for weeks at a stretch. The math, in short, wasn’t adding up.

“He’s like, ‘That’s not any good anymore. I’m going to have outside temps of 42 degrees; what good is a system that only imagines a high temp of 37 degrees?’” Judd said. “He sent them back to the drawing board.”

It’s the kind of systemic change that the industry will have to get used to making as the new climate reality settles in, he added. Simply put, the “systems that it’s relied on to keep workers relatively cool and productive won’t cut it anymore.

As the mounting frequency of heatwaves charging across the planet continues to drive up the risk of supply chain disruptions and human suffering with one record-toppling month after another, stoking changes that could irrevocably alter the dynamics of apparel production, one question looms above all others: Just how bad are things going to get?

To quote the popular “Mad Men” meme, “Not great, Bob!”—particularly if the industry doesn’t rapidly adapt, according to Judd, co-author of a policy brief that follows up a pair of reports that provided a brutally honest, if conservative tally of climate change’s potential damage on export earnings, employment and worker health already roiled by geopolitical shakeups and nearly unprecedented economic turmoil. (And that’s without President-elect Donald Trump’s potential trade war casting a further pall.) The original research was conducted in tandem with investment management firm Schroders. This time, the Global Labor Institute enlisted a climate scientist.

Hot enough for you?

Tracking the accelerations in heat in nearly two dozen hubs worldwide—particularly the focus cities of Dhaka in Bangladesh, Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam, Phnom Penh in Cambodia and Karachi in Pakistan—over the past two decades, Judd and company were able to draw two broad conclusions, both of which indicate tipping points of sorts.

One, that since the average number of high-heat days hitting 35 degrees Celsius (95 degrees Fahrenheit) have ticked up in 17 of its 23 destinations by more than 10 percent, temperatures are certainly on the upswing. And two, that with the number of days where wet-bulb globe figures—as read by a thermometer covered in a damp cloth to measure relative humidity—exceeded the “moderate” 30.5 degree-Celsius (86.9 degree-Fahrenheit) heat stress threshold climbing by 42 percent between 2005-2009 and 2020-2024 in the aforementioned five cities, garment workers are becoming more susceptible to exhaustion, fainting, heatstroke, even death.

It’s all, as Judd said, “very nerdy,” especially with the second, arguably more revealing, batch of calculations, which required the development of a new methodology, plus a cap of just five cities because the computers could only crunch so much data. Even so, the numbers are reason enough for alarm because the dire scenarios scientists have been warning about for decades appear to be coming to a head. While Judd isn’t taken aback by much these days, he and his colleagues were still startled by the almost aggressive acceleration in heat stress in nearly every city over the past two years.

“We didn’t get to run all 23 cities, so I think we’d have found some real surprises among places we know less about,” he said.

Flooding, another hallmark of climate breakdown, is also ratcheting up in intensity. Projections from the previous reports surmised that a “worst-case flooding”—that is to say, a major flood event in 2050 or sooner—could inundate roughly a respective 22 percent and 27 percent of facilities in Vietnam and Bangladesh by 0.5 meters or more. By using rainfall as a proxy for riverine flooding risk this time, the Global Labor Institute found that 10 of the 23 cities experienced at least a 10 percent increase in average rainfall between the first and the last five years bookending 20 years of data.

But heat, in contrast to its more isolated if “dramatically destructive” counterpart, is “relatively predictable,” meaning it can be anticipated, Judd said. “You can see how it’s climbing across these last 20 years, and you can see what we project for it in 2030 and 2050, but you can plan for that,” he added.

Still, the response from the industry to the 2024 reports and their full-throated call for adaptation in parallel with mitigation has been, if not muted, then less than voluble. Brands think it’s a supplier problem, while suppliers are leery of getting stuck paying for improvements they can ill-afford with increasing costing pressures.

“The uptake is a little slow for a problem that we all regard as pretty urgent,” Judd said. “I think for some brands and manufacturers, this is a sort of hot potato. Nobody wants to be caught holding it. And it feels like it’s been a long time since we published those reports, but brands and governments seem to be just now getting their heads around the business case and the legal application.”

Carbon tunnel syndrome

Multi-stakeholder and standards-setting organizations, aside from the International Labour Organization’s Better Factories Cambodia, also continue to lack any meaningful heat standards or protocols where national laws fall short, as they often do with vague or non-existent guardrails. There is an overwhelming sense that everyone understands the need for swifter change, but few are doing anything beyond brandishing their voluntary and non-enforceable codes of conduct, which often make broad commitments on worker health and safety without touching on heat, or expressing the nebulous desire to collaborate, which tends to result in similarly stunted ambitions.

Suppliers, who have to be pragmatic, on the other hand, are left, for the most part, with holding the bag. “Ethical” manufacturers are beginning to use air-conditioning to cool their facilities “with a view of ensuring the well-being and comfort of the workers,” said Nemanthie Kooragamage, director of group sustainable business at MAS Holdings in Sri Lanka.

“This does have a cost-related impact, and of course an energy intensity impact, which the manufacturers have to consciously offset through renewable energy options,” she said. “However, we need to take a balanced approach to this. We do believe that the benefits of climate adaptation and of educating the supply chain and communities we operate in far outweigh the efficacy of the reactive measures that need to be taken once a catastrophic weather event occurs.”

Meanwhile, the push to decarbonize, though vital for the long-term future of the industry—and indeed, that of the planet—continues to suck up all the oxygen in a discourse with additional immediate-term dimensions.

“The fact is that the industry conversations around climate change are only about decarbonization,” said Naurin Muzaffar, strategic advisor of sustainability at Crescent Bahuman, a vertically integrated denim manufacturer in Pakistan. “Production hubs are suffering but there seems to be no place to have this conversation as brands are working in silos. If we are to address these issues, the industry requires a collective approach and solutions. Brands need to sit down with the manufacturers in these production hubs and find regional solutions.”

The tension between adaptation and mitigation, as well as that between buyers and suppliers, is reflective of the fight that recently played out at the United Nations climate summit in Azerbaijan, colloquially known as COP29, over the inadequacy of climate change financing for poorer nations.

“It’s this battle between the global South, which is struggling to grow, and the global North, which is anxious to limit emissions,” Judd said.

At the same time, the mandate to do something—anything—isn’t just an economic one but a moral one, as well. Many garment workers in the global South live in homes that aren’t able to handle heat waves or flooding and they’re unlikely to make it to work if they’re experiencing heat exhaustion, their roads are impassable or, in the case of the women who predominantly make up the industry’s workforce, have to shoulder the additional care of sick children and seniors.

This “leaves them in a vicious poverty trap,” said Vidhura Ralapanawe, executive vice president at Epic Group, a garment manufacturer with four hubs in Bangladesh. Not to mention that unwell workers are less able and prolific workers.

“We must remember that fashion manufacturing is somewhat concentrated in poorer countries and regions that may not have financial and/or technical resources to understand, analyze and adapt to these threats effectively as businesses, communities and governments, especially for critical infrastructure,” said Ralapanawe, who has a background in climate science.

“It is also not an issue of their own making as most of these countries have contributed very little to the creation of the problem,” he added. “The climate debt owed to these countries and communities must be part of the consideration as we move to address them; it should not add to their debt burden or financial challenges that many of these countries already face.”

Judd agrees that there’s a need to employ climate-adaptive investments to address both the physical risks and the social ones.

“There’s only so much that employers and governments can do through physical investments and programs,” he said. “The truly adaptive investments go straight to workers and families: It’s social protection systems that account for climate events, living wages and, an old favorite, the right to organize and the right to bargain at the factory level so workers and managers can figure out how to respond to extreme heat or flooding.”

Something that may “change the industry’s calculus,” the brief said, is the arrival of legal liability for supply chain malfeasance in the form of the European Union’s corporate sustainability due diligence directive, or CSDDD—even if the much-watered down version that made it through the legislative ring of fire will apply only to a tiny fraction of the firms operating in the 27-nation bloc when it enters into force circa 2026.

“We don’t know how strong a hook that is yet, but worker health and safety is an obligation for lead firms in the CSDDD,” Judd said. “So if you’re a brand that knows that there are extreme temperatures on the floor in production areas among your manufacturers, and you don’t do anything about it, you’re liable. That’s our reading. Somebody’s got to step in with a clear standard. It might be a German judge, right?”