Cascale’s annual meeting kicked off in Hong Kong last month with an exuberant drum performance and a slight but significant disagreement that mirrored broader tensions rippling across the global apparel industry.
“I know that morale is low,” said Isabelle Kumar, the former Euronews evening news anchor who was pitching in as the two-day conference’s emcee. “I’ve been speaking to people around the corridors, speaking to organizers, and it feels that the work that was hard achieved is unraveling, being unpicked before our very eyes as a new political reality begins to take hold. Some of you may be feeling a bit disempowered, demoralized, disillusioned, even possibly a bit desperate.”
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She spread her hands, as if in defeat: “I’ve got so many letter ‘D’s.”
When Harsh Saini, the multi-stakeholder organization’s interim CEO, joined Kumar on stage a short moment later, she gently questioned if another “D,” derailing, was undermining progress to fight climate change or promote decent work—two central issues around which the meeting was organized.
“I’m not so sure that’s happening, because we have the most dedicated people and the most passionate people working in the area,” Saini said. “So the work is going to continue. Companies are still continuing to do what they need to do. They understand that having sustainability at their core is what will make their businesses more resilient. Risk management becomes better and, inevitably, at some point, the profit comes in as well.”
Whether the fashion industry is or isn’t in a so-called “sustainability retreat,” as Tufts University professor Ken Pucker first described a year ago, has been a bone of contention. What some have characterized as a much-needed reset to adapt to turbulent economic and geopolitical realities is being interpreted by others as a feckless rollback of once-vaunted, if perhaps overly confident, greenhouse gas ambitions.
Asos and Crocs sounded early alarms when they each called time on their existing climate commitments in 2023. Nike jettisoned nearly one-third of its sustainability workforce in 2024, then parted ways with its top sustainability executive in September. Walmart whiffed its Scope 1 and 3 objectives in 2024. Over the summer, Under Armour said it would pursue neither the revalidation of its 2030 emissions reduction targets, nor the approval of what was formerly its 2050 net-zero roadmap, by the Science-Based Targets initiative, a standards body. Last week, Ralph Lauren dropped its 2040 net-zero pledge, opting instead for rolling five-year emissions reduction “milestones” with a near-term focus on its 2030 goals.
Even among clothing and footwear purveyors that remain unshaken in their promises, nearly two-thirds are procrastinating on their decarbonization schedules, a recent McKinsey study found. Another 40 percent have seen their emissions increase since they made those commitments.
But while “everything seems to be going backwards,” nothing could be further from the truth, Paul Polman, co-founder and co-chair of The Fashion Pact, a CEO-led sustainable fashion initiative, said at an event during Climate Week NYC last month.
“We’re sitting very, very close to major tipping points on the energy transition,” the former Unilever CEO said. “You can shout, ‘Drill, baby drill,’ but nothing is being drilled in the U.S. even now. You can say, ‘Keep coal mines open,’ but they cost a billion dollars a week to keep open. Forget the morality, the future of humanity, your children, your grandchildren, all the things that make us cry. The economics are now overwhelmingly in favor of green energy. And that’s why people are doing it.”
Polman said that the challenge today isn’t so much proving a business case but “how fast we can go” because “we need to do twice as fast versus what we do now in the next four or five years, and then three times as fast thereafter, to be totally decarbonized.” Doing so requires collective courage from businesses that are willing to “stick their necks out” for both the future of humanity and the future of their companies.
“The leaders of the companies you represent know that impact without profit is not a going strategy,” he told the audience. “They understand that profit without sustainability won’t give you a longer-lasting strategy. But they struggle with, ‘How do we do it?’ They struggle with the ambition of being a little bit more courageous than they otherwise would. Too many in your industry and in other industries play what I call ‘not to lose’ versus ‘playing to win’.“
Some companies are indeed pulling back because of headwinds from multiple fronts, resulting in the dissolution of coalitions and the erosion of activity required for systems-wide progress, according to an analysis published last month in the Harvard Business Review. At the same time, the authors argue, data demonstrates that “at the individual level,” 85 percent of companies are still holding fast to their sustainability commitments or even accelerated them, albeit “under the radar.”
What is becoming apparent, the study said, is a significant pattern of “greenhushing,” where “strategic silence and symbolic adjustments intentionally conceal value creation and operational resilience.” But though what’s “really” shifting is visibility, not underlying strategy, if greenhushing becomes the foremost corporate strategy, “today’s quiet retreats may become a systemic failure to act,” it said.
“Without visible leadership, the shared momentum needed to transform systems could face paralysis,” wrote consultants Neil Hawkins, president of Michigan Sustainability Associates, and Kelly Cooper, founding partner of Sustainable Innovation Group. “If the market mistakes strategic silence for surrender, business risks losing the urgency and collective influence required to scale climate-aligned transformation.”
To which Pucker, posting on LinkedIn, responded with, “More of the same will lead to more of the same.”
Going on the down-low
Joseph Phi, CEO of Hong Kong-based supply chain management company Li & Fung, spoke out against greenhushing during his keynote speech at the Cascale annual meeting. Companies do this, he said, because they’re looking to dodge the mounting consumer and regulatory backlash to exaggerated sustainability claims, a phenomenon known as greenwashing.
“That backlash is now preventing companies from reporting their climate targets and initiatives,” he said. “Basically, they’re saying, ‘I don’t want to publish my targets and my actions because people may criticize me personally.’ I’m very much against this. It undermines transparency, it slows down collective learning and it reduces industry peer pressure, which is very important for learning, for improvement.”
So the question hanging over everyone right now, Phi said, is whether sustainability has become unsustainable.
“Given all the macroeconomic headwinds, given all the geopolitical challenges that we all face, it’s so easy to say that, well, sustainability should take a back seat; let’s hit the pause button,” he said. “But the truth is that we are reaching very fast planetary boundaries, and the planetary reality says that if we retreat today, it’s like committing economic suicide. Essentially, we’re mortgaging our future.”
A 2025 CEO survey by the United Nations Global Compact and Accenture, also published in September, said that the majority (88 percent) of CEOs report that the business case for sustainability is stronger than it was five years ago. But only half of the leaders surveyed feel comfortable communicating their progress publicly, resulting in many companies shrinking away from making public sustainability statements amid intensifying political and public klieg lights.
The findings come at a crucial time: 2024 is the first calendar year to overshoot the Paris Agreement’s 1.5-degree Celsius threshold. The report also offers one of the most comprehensive longitudinal views of CEO sentiment on sustainability, just as the UN Global Compact enters its 25th year, the organizations said.
With only 35 percent of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goal targets on track, however, “decisive action” is needed from business leaders, the report said. Governments, too, must step up. Some 92 percent of the CEOs polled believe that it’s only through strong global governance and policy alignment that the global sustainability agenda can be achieved.
“CEOs’ actions in the next few years will determine whether the private sector moves toward sustainable growth or defaults to scattered progress,” the UN Global Compact and Accenture said. “The path of coordinated acceleration would see CEOs uniting around five key priorities—collaborating on regulation, harnessing consumer demand, expanding access to technology, upskilling for the future and leading with credibility and purpose—to ignite momentum, build trust and align public and private sectors for systemic impact.”
The alternative, on the other hand? “Fragmented adoption, wherein uneven regulations, misaligned incentives and inequitable access to capital and technology stall momentum for a generation.”
“We are all here today because we know what’s at stake, and we all firmly and truly believe that inaction is a choice that we can no longer afford in today’s world where volatility is the norm, and disruption probably is the only constant,” Suren Fernando, CEO of MAS Holdings, one of South Asia’s largest apparel and textile manufacturers, said at the Cascale event.
The industry doesn’t need more perfect strategies, he said. Rather, it must choose progress over perfection, look to leaders who are willing to think in the short and long term, and make decisions grounded in clarity and values.
“In the end, what has guided us isn’t a single innovation or strategy,” Fernando said. “It’s been a steady commitment to doing the work year on year. Through disruption, uncertainty and change, we’ve taken a long-term view on talent, on partnerships and on sustainability, and we’ve tried to act always with discipline and intent. The values we prioritize in moments of pressure will determine not just how we navigate the next few years, but what kind of industry we will build for the decades to come.”
