Want to Protect Workers? Tackle Climate Change, Say Activists

For a little over a decade, activist group Fashion Revolution has galvanised consumers to ask fashion brands a simple, but loaded question: ‘Who made my clothes?’

Forged in the aftermath of the fatal Rana Plaza factory collapse in Bangladesh, the campaign was a demand for fashion companies to both provide more transparency about their operations and take more action to ensure garment workers were protected. The hashtag #WhoMadeMyClothes has now been posted more than a million times on Instagram.

Now Fashion Revolution is hoping to generate similar engagement with a new question: “What fuels fashion?”

The goal is to drive consumer attention to the industry’s reliance on planet-warming fossil fuels and pressure big brands who are lagging on climate commitments to step up investment in decarbonisation. The issue is fundamentally a human one: the fallout from the climate crisis is falling disproportionately on those who did the least to cause it, including garment workers.

“Our clothes are fuelling the climate crisis, and the people who make them are paying the price,” Fashion Revolution said in its annual Fashion Transparency Index, which launched alongside the campaign on Thursday.

The high-profile report ranks 250 big brands’ environmental and human rights performance based on public disclosures. In a special edition this year, it zoned in on companies’ efforts to decarbonise. The single-issue focus allowed the organisation to deep dive on a critical topic on a bigger scale than previous analyses, while also bringing it more mainstream attention.

“We’ve been trying to up the ante,” said Fashion Revolution’s global policy and campaigns director, Maeve Galvin. “We’re seeing that things are not moving at the pace they should.”

Brands assessed for the report were scored out of a possible 150 points, subsequently converted to percentages. Overall, the average score was just 18 points out of 100. Puma and Gucci were the top performers with scores of 75 and 74 respectively. But more than 30 major brands, including sneaker label Reebok, Rihanna’s lingerie brand Savage X Fenty and Estée Lauder’s Tom Ford brand scored nothing.

The campaign launched less than a week after the UN called for action to stem an “extreme heat epidemic,” as the world entered its 13th straight month of record-breaking temperatures. The climate chaos has brought misery and disruption to many of the world’s largest garment manufacturing hubs and consumer markets. But many of the world’s largest fashion brands still aren’t even engaging with the issue, Fashion Revolution said.

Nearly a quarter of the 250 companies assessed in this year’s Index provided no information at all about plans to decarbonise. More than half have yet to take basic steps, like setting a credible emissions reduction target. Just 56 indicated their emissions are actually falling.

Companies provide even less information about how they plan to achieve their climate goals or what it will take to decarbonise their supply chains, where most of the industry’s emissions take place. Though workers are increasingly losing their livelihoods to climate change-fuelled weather extremes, only seven brands indicate they’ve made efforts to provide compensation when disaster strikes. Just a slightly larger number provide any information on how they intend to help finance moves to shift the wider industry to renewables.

“We should be outraged there is such a lack of transparency on how brands are tackling the climate crisis,” said Fashion Revolution’s policy and research manager Liv Simpliciano. “The timeline we have to address these impacts is diminishing.”

The group is calling for brands to set aside 2 percent of their annual revenue for a “Just Transition” fund devoted to enabling a shift across the industry to clean, renewable energy and supporting workers.

Templates for such a mechanism do exist. Some brands already operate with an internal carbon price, setting aside a certain amount of money for every tonne of carbon they emit and using the funds to further sustainability projects. Thousands of companies have signed up to 1 percent for the planet, committing to donate 1 percent of annual sales to environmental organisations.

“We’re hoping to push brands in the right direction with a focus on a fair, clean and just transition,” said Galvin. “Those who pollute the most should pay the most.”