The fashion industry has a lot of work to do when it comes to reducing its impact on climate change.
“Fashion on Climate,” a report released Wednesday by the Global Fashion Agenda and McKinsey & Co., is upping the urgency for the industry’s action to curb emissions.
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“Climate change is not going away, when it really kicks in it will really affect [the fashion business] supply chains,” urged Morten Lehmann, chief sustainability officer at GFA, and one of the report’s authors.
Today, the industry’s impact represents some 2.1 billion tonnes of CO2 emissions, or about 4 percent of the global total, according to the report, the first since McKinsey and GFA began their multiyear partnership last year. That’s the same as what France, Germany and the United Kingdom emit per year, combined.
At its current clip, the fashion industry is set to miss the 1.5-degree Celcius pathway to mitigate climate change set out by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change by 50 percent. Without further action, emissions could rise by as much as 2.7 percent annually, reaching 2.7 billion tonnes a year by the start of the next decade.
For fashion to achieve global climate goals, it will have to halve its carbon emissions, bringing them down to around 1.1 billion tonnes by 2030, which is no small feat given the pandemic “has painted a polarized picture,” as far as sustainability priorities go, with some putting their eco-efforts on the back burner, as Lehmann and others in the industry have inferred. But that may not be the best move.
“The world has changed — consumers are looking for more sustainable companies and brands,” said McKinsey senior partner and coleader of its Apparel, Fashion & Luxury group. “Bold action is required if the fashion industry is to meet the ambitious target of aligning with a 1.5-degree pathway in the next 10 years. The good news for the fashion industry is that many of the required actions can be delivered with beneficial economics.”
The Cost
The report details the cost benefits of each criterion in what it’s calling “accelerated abatement” to help right the industry’s climate wrongs, accounting for economic factors like the rising prices of organic cotton and recycled synthetics, the payoff in initial training, technology, energy and material mix investments and what adoption levels are needed for circular business models to thrive.
On the bright side, according to Anna Granskog, McKinsey partner in the sustainability practice, “many of the required actions can be delivered at a moderate cost,” with roughly 55 percent of the actions required for abatement delivered at net cost savings, “on an industry-wide basis,” meaning collaboration, if necessitated by incentives, is crucial. Efforts like “coordinated decarbonization” across upstream, brand-owned and consumer activities.