If conversations about apparel and textiles have seemed few and far between at the United Nations climate conference, known this year as COP31, it’s because they have been.
As a bloc, fashion has largely sat out the two-week conference since 2024, when major conglomerates like Kering and LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton joined prominent world leaders from France, Germany and the United States in skipping COP29 in Azerbaijan due to a heady mix of geopolitical tensions, domestic political crises and changing corporate sustainability priorities.
Despite worsening extreme heat, drought and wildfires that pose an existential risk to supply chains—not to mention the people working within them—alongside warnings of what scientists say is an inevitable overshoot of the Paris Agreement’s 1.5-degree Celsius threshold, the industry hasn’t shown up in a meaningful way since. Even as brands fall further behind on their climate targets, there will be no equivalent to Stella McCartney’s COP26 “Future of Fashion” materials exhibition in Antalya, Turkey, this month, nor to the COP27 fashion industry target consultation led by Global Fashion Agenda and the United Nations Environment Programme.
Part of the reason, Lewis Perkins, president of the Apparel Impact Institute, surmises, is that as the stakes have risen, the focus has moved to bigger-picture priorities: mustering financing to help developing and small-island nations adapt to climate change and address the loss and damage already underway, for instance, or persuading nations to commit to electrifying more than a third of the global economy by 2035. Anecdotally, he’s heard that travel budgets are tighter than ever, with a growing slew of more targeted industry events such as the Global Fashion Summit, the Cascale and Textile Exchange annual meetings and, recently, New York Climate Week jostling for resources.
“If companies are going to send people, they want to be in the rooms where they’re talking about the types of technology or investment that are actually relevant to what they’re trying to achieve,” he said. “They’re finding that more work is happening at closed-door event activations, like the work that Aii is leading, where we get brands and suppliers in the room together and start looking at feasibility studies on technologies.”
That doesn’t mean global policy and real-world supply chains aren’t closely intertwined—far from it. Much of garment and textile production is concentrated in the global South, where countries such as Bangladesh, India and Vietnam require equitable climate finance, adaptation support and a just energy transition to protect lives and avert severe economic loss.
Right now, brands and retailers aren’t sending a clear enough message that they’ll pull production if decarbonization isn’t prioritized, Perkins said. If producing nations fail to support clean energy, lower energy costs and protect resources like water, they’ll become too risky or commercially unviable for buyers to source from, he warned.
Which raises the persistent question: Who’s paying for all of this?
Stand.earth has no doubt who should be shelling out. In July, the environmental group led a “formal request” to the Fashion Industry Charter for Climate Action, a UN initiative that has rallied nearly 130 boldface names, including Adidas, Chanel, H&M Group and Nike, to commit to halving greenhouse gas emissions, phasing out coal use and transitioning to low-impact, circular materials. In it, co-signers such as Amnesty International and the Bangladesh Center for Workers Solidarity said the charter needs not only to implement its proposed framework in a “fair, transparent and time-bound way,” but also to include specific commitments to financial and capacity-building support from signatory brands.
“Despite a clearly stated aim to update the charter along these lines, it appears as though members are struggling to cohere around a shared definition of just transition and how it can be actionable for members, leading to lengthy delays and an impasse that genuinely slows progress,” said Rachel Kitchin, senior campaign manager at Stand.earth. “To me, this is a really critical gap in what is supposed to be a leading platform for the industry.”
Financing is evidently something the charter has been mulling. In August, the initiative released two reports examining how market-based approaches and sustainable finance tools can unlock capital to slash emissions across the industry, homing in on upstream manufacturing in major production hubs.
Their goal, according to Matthew Guenther, vice president of corporate sustainability at TAL Apparel and co-chair of the Fashion Industry Charter for Climate Action Steering Committee, is to “invite the industry to reflect more deeply on whether our current market and commercial models are capable of delivering our climate ambitions.” Overcoming fashion’s shared challenges, he added, will require “collaboration, shared responsibility and a willingness to think beyond conventional financing approaches.”
There are slivers of progress. Aii has for years been building the $250 million grantmaking and blended finance vehicle known as the Fashion Climate Fund to help scale carbon-reduction solutions with the support of Lululemon, H&M Group, the H&M Foundation, Target, PVH Corp. and others. More recently, Fashion Pact’s Future Supplier Initiative convened brands such as Bestseller, Gap Inc., H&M Group and Ralph Lauren to back de-risked, low-interest loans and technical support to help suppliers switch from fossil fuels.
On Tuesday, Social Investment Managers & Advisors LLC and the International Finance Corporation launched the Decarbonization of Textile, Apparel, & Footwear Suppliers Fund, or D-TAFS, aiming to mobilize $400 million to transform the sector’s supply chains, with a particular focus on small and medium-sized enterprises. IFC and Zara owner Inditex, the fund’s biggest investors, will chip in up to $60 million and $50 million, respectively, for projects involving energy efficiency, renewable energy, water saving and pollution reduction.
With other participating investors including FMO, Proparco, British International Investment, the Global Environment Facility and Aii, the fund’s first close is poised to reach $225 million, with further fundraising rounds planned to raise the rest.
“Transforming supply chains requires the industry to work together and manufacturers to have access to both technical expertise and the financing needed to make these investments,” said Óscar García Maceiras, CEO at Inditex. “At Inditex, we have been working for more than two years with our suppliers to understand their factories’ needs and develop tailored transformation plans through independent engineering consultancy. D-TAFS can help take the next step: turning already identified improvements into investments and measurable results and enabling the transformation of the industry.”
Financing emissions cuts—which Aii estimates would require $1 trillion by 2050—is only part of the challenge, however. The way Kitchin sees it, climate adaptation and mitigation efforts often end up being pitted against one another. At Stand.earth’s multi-stakeholder event in Bangladesh last month, manufacturers spoke about how rising energy demand to cool factories was standing in the way of climate targets. The charter, she said, needs to be loud and clear that workers aren’t “going to be sacrificed” in the name of climate action and that brands have a responsibility to support both.
“It’s frankly concerning to see how quiet the once-ambitious charter has become,” Kitchin said. “No longer holding in-person gatherings at either the technical COP in Bonn or as part of the main COP agenda, even when that COP is taking place in a major fashion-producing country, is indicative of a loss of momentum.”
What’s more troubling for her, however, is that the charter’s apparent retreat reflects a wider trend away from spotlighting fashion in international climate discussions. Brands, Kitchin said, are “getting quieter across the board when it comes to climate,” even as the “challenges are not going away, and emissions are still going up.”
Up is right: Driven primarily by a surge in global fiber production, particularly virgin polyester, the industry’s climate footprint grew 14 percent between 2022 and 2024, according to Aii.
A ‘missed opportunity’
Fashion isn’t completely off the slate at COP31. On Wednesday, Canopy will host a talk with Gudrun Messias, director of global sustainability direction at Adidas, and Philipp Boening, senior director of commercial strategy at Circ, at TED Countdown House on “rewiring fashion: scaling supply chains that keep ancient forests standing.” On Saturday, the Fair Labor Association will host a session at the World Health Organization Pavilion examining how extreme heat affects workers in global supply chains. And next week, the Waste and Resources Action Programme, better known as WRAP, will hold a panel titled “Textiles: The Future of Fashion and the Waste We Export” at the Zero Waste Pavilion in the Blue Zone.
Nicole Rycroft, founder and executive director at Canopy, agrees that fashion’s presence on the ground in Antalya is thin this year, calling it a “missed opportunity” given Turkey’s importance to the apparel supply chain. Still, she considers the designation of zero waste and the circular economy as core pillars of COP31’s Action Agenda a “big win for the planet given how carbon-intensive materials are and how often they’re not part of these high-level frameworks.”
Canopy’s own research found that substituting next-gen materials such as agricultural residues, recycled textiles, food waste and microbial cellulose for virgin wood-derived pulp avoids an average of 4 metric tons of carbon emissions per ton of pulp replaced. Considering that supply chains can move in years rather than decades when a critical mass of stakeholders work together, it’s time to “unlock circular materials at scale” through unequivocal demand signals, Rycroft said.
“Antalya’s goal for 15 percent circular materials in manufacturing by 2035 is an important direction set for global governments,” she added. “Policymakers have a key role to play in creating the enabling policy that can unlock next-gen production at scale. I’d like to see that 15 percent goal matched or surpassed with the investment needed for next-gen infrastructure and governments setting the policy conditions for manufacturers to meet.”
The voices of workers and their representatives, too, need to be elevated at events like this, said Tiffany Rogers, vice president of research and development at the Fair Labor Association, whose heat stress panel will bring together participants from New York University’s Stern School of Business; Royal Holloway, University of London; Threading Change; Öz İplik İş; the Self-Employed Women’s Association; and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.
While many conversations about the fashion industry’s climate transition focus on circularity, recycling and technological solutions, “far too few” reflect the experiences of the workers and local communities whose health, safety and livelihoods are most directly affected, she said.
“The people who make our clothes are experiencing the consequences of climate change firsthand and must have a central place in shaping the industry’s climate response,” Rogers said. “A just transition cannot be achieved without putting workers’ experiences, rights and well-being at its center.”
But even when fashion isn’t explicitly on the agenda, it’s often implicated in other discussions, said Emma Håkansson, founder and director of Collective Fashion Justice. One issue she’s paying attention to is methane, which traps more than 80 times as much heat as carbon dioxide over a 20-year period. The COP31 Action Agenda aims to aggressively curb methane emissions by halving growth in global waste by 2035. Because agriculture accounts for roughly 40 percent of methane emissions, livestock management is another salient topic.
Make no mistake, fashion is on the hook. Collective Fashion Justice’s research found that while animal-derived leather, wool and cashmere account for just 3.8 percent of materials used in the industry, they make up 75 percent of its annual methane footprint. Leather alone accounts for 54.1 percent of annual methane emissions by materials, the organization said.
It’s why Håkansson views a recent COP31 “manifesto” with no small measure of disbelief. Issued by the Confederation of National Associations of Tanners and Dressers of the European Community—CONTANCE, for short—it calls natural materials like leather and wool “part of the solution to the climate challenge” and asserts that “hides and skins from animals slaughtered for human food consumption purposes…are by definition not drivers of environmental change.”
“They also are pushing this disinformation campaign where they argue that biogenic methane—the type that cows would belch through enteric fermentation—functions differently from fossil fuel methane,” Håkansson said. “But we know that at a chemical and molecular level, biogenic and fossil methane are exactly the same, and when they are in the atmosphere, they function exactly the same.”
Kitchin cautioned that COP31 negotiations will have direct consequences for the industry’s supply chains whether or not brands are present. In Bangladesh, for example, the government has set ambitious conditional emissions and energy transition targets that depend on global financial support and are critical for brands to achieve their own supply chain climate goals. Industrial electrification is another key priority, and as an industry with relatively low-temperature heat requirements, fashion should be “among the earliest movers,” she said.
And the Global Carbon Market Network, set to debut at COP31 on Thursday to tackle fragmentation in carbon markets and funnel more funds into climate projects in developing countries, could potentially ease bottlenecks that affect how brands navigate carbon pricing, supply chain decarbonization and offsetting.
Kitchin is also watching for progress on COP30’s commitments to climate adaptation and a just transition, including stronger links to national adaptation plans and protections for labor rights as industries shift to cleaner production. Brands need to help turn that progress into practical support for workers facing extreme heat, flooding and other climate risks, including by adopting measures to strengthen climate resilience and sharing adaptation technologies.
Perkins, for his part, is approaching COP31 as he has every COP—with a mix of cautious optimism and hope, though he has yet to see anything emerge that directly affects the fashion sector from a government or regulatory perspective.
He is on the lookout for new funds and other sources of catalytic capital that Aii could align with its Fashion Climate Fund to support suppliers.
“But from a policy perspective, I just stand by and watch,” he said.
