Clean energy advocates have lauded Levi’s for engaging with its suppliers to support their efforts to scale the use of renewable energy, for example.
“We know that we need to drive resilience across our operations,” says a Levi’s spokesperson, who points to the brand’s Water Action Strategy, which scales water recycling and reuse in manufacturing. Other initiatives include investment in new business models, including secondhand, and material innovations like cottonized hemp. These efforts “enable us to make products and do business in a way that’s less dependent on increasingly stressed natural resources”.
Accounting for the workforce
Ayesha Barenblat, founder of the nonprofit Remake, says most of the industry’s commitments have yet to consider the impacts that climate change has on the world’s most vulnerable, including the millions of workers who power its supply chain.
“Brands have outsourced all the climate impacts and take no accountability for the frontline communities impacted by fashion, as we’ve seen with floods in Bangladesh, fires in Pakistan,” she says. “Even in LA where most US garment production happens, the state is currently on fire and dealing with acute water shortages.”
For her, that draws one of the clearest links yet between the urgent need for emissions reductions with that for better labour practices. She says the Garment Worker Protection Act, currently being debated in California, “is presumably about holding brands and suppliers liable to $15 minimum wage but [it] will also retain and grow sustainable, ethical businesses in California”.
Speeding up targets
Across the industry, companies have released climate commitments in recent years that set ambitious targets for 2040 and 2050. But without clear strategies for how to meet those targets — without a timeline of interim goals along the way — experts are unconvinced they will. “Generally speaking, targets that are 20 years out are just aspirational in nature,” Michael Sadowski, a consultant for the World Resources Institute (a partner organisation of the Science Based Targets initiative) told Vogue Business in June.
The IPCC report makes clear that it’s what companies do in the next five or ten years that will really matter; that if they aren’t reining emissions in significantly by 2030, their 2050 targets could be meaningless.
If they don’t act now, fashion companies will not only hold more responsibility for the climate crisis than they do today, but they can expect more disruption to their own businesses, says Cummis. “It is inevitable that extreme weather events will disrupt supply chains and manufacturing will become difficult as more fires, droughts, etc., hit vulnerable countries and affect the workforce.”
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