In 2022, LaRhea Pepper, then-CEO of Textile Exchange, warned attendees in Colorado Springs about the dangers of succumbing to “carbon tunnel vision.” She was citing the researcher Jan Konietzko, who coined the term after noticing companies concentrating their efforts on net-zero emissions to the exclusion of almost everything else.
“Yes, we’ve got to address carbon concretely,” Pepper said. “But without losing sight of the importance of protecting the ecosystem, protecting the people, protecting the biodiversity, protecting our water.”
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Not doing so, she added, would be an enormous mistake, particularly for an industry that hinges on a secure supply of natural raw materials such as cotton, merino wool, cashmere and leather. Curbing global warming is important, but so is addressing the biodiversity collapse that habitat loss from agriculture and urbanization have wrought. The two crises are so intertwined that it’s impossible to tease out where one ends and the other begins.
“We think about climate and nature as two sides of the same coin,” said Beth Jensen, senior director of climate and nature impact at the multi-stakeholder organization, which issued guidance this week to help apparel and textile purveyors set science-based targets for nature. “We strongly believe that while companies should be looking at their greenhouse gas emissions and trying to make those reductions, they should be looking simultaneously at their nature-related impacts.”
This can feel like a tall order for companies that have only had to set medium- and long-term carbon reduction goals for approval by groups such as the Science Based Targets initiative, better known as SBTi. Tallying greenhouse gas emissions is an easier ask, relatively speaking, than measuring less overtly quantitative subjects like averting groundwater depletion, shoring up soil health and restoring natural habitats. Biomes, which are diffuse and complex biological communities very much rooted in place and climate, can vary wildly from one corner of the planet to the next. In sharp contrast, one metric ton of carbon dioxide is the same whether it’s generated in Texas or Uganda.
“You can’t consolidate around a single kind of metric in the same way as you can with GHG emissions,” Jensen said. “You have to look at it from a context-specific point of view, like a specific freshwater basin or a specific land area. And so the question is, how do you do that? How do you align around a consistent way to understand those baseline impacts at the ground level, at the landscape level, at the material level, at the industry level?”
When SBTi’s founders—CDP, the World Resources Institute, the World Wildlife Fund and the United Nations Global Compact—decided to link arms with Conservation International, the UN Environment Programme World Conservation Monitoring Centre and the World Economic Forum, to create the Science Based Targets Network, or SBTN, as a separate though overlapping entity in 2019, it was with the idea of building on the momentum that its predecessor had begun four years earlier. The question now is whether it can gain the same traction and, despite increasing reports of brands and retailers whiffing emissions deadlines, achieve some modicum of success.
But pinning down organization-wide goals—versus, say, investing in a regenerative cotton program and calling it a day—is a valuable exercise because it improves the “durability aspect” of those ideals, said Erin Billman, executive director of SBTN. She said she’s used to seeing lofty sustainability strategies that sound ambitious on paper but often lack a means of tracking progress.
“The theory behind targets is that you manage what you measure and that by having a consistent approach, there can be a means for comparability as well as transparency and accountability, so that stakeholders can have a way of checking their credibility and the companies themselves can have the confidence of knowing how much is enough,” she said.
So far, SBTN is the only way to formally adopt and validate science-based targets for nature, though Textile Exchange’s report has mapped them against other complementary disclosure frameworks and regulations, such as the Corporate Social Reporting Directive, the Taskforce for Nature-related Financial Disclosure, the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework and the UN Sustainable Development Goals. These have fed into SBTN’s standards and vice versa, which helps with harmonization in “issue hubs” such as land and freshwater (now updated with detailed technical guidance) and oceans and biodiversity (next on the docket).
“It’s earlier days in the nature space, but the good news is that the key initiatives that are working most with business, which includes SBTN, TNFD and the Nature Positive Initiative, are all collaborating with each other,” Billman said. “We are working on convergence where convergence makes sense, and clarifying where there is divergence because there will be different purposes and use cases.”
But fashion is far from the only sector that’s lagging. It was only late last year at the United Nations Biodiversity Conference, colloquially known as COP16, in the Colombian city of Cali, that countries agreed to strengthen the role of Indigenous peoples and local communities in safeguarding biodiversity. And despite promises of biodiversity financing from the likes of the European Union, which has earmarked 7 billion euros ($7.3 billion) for the 2021-2027 period, governments still need to translate pledges into investments.
“The foundations of life are unraveling. Biodiversity is on the brink,” UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres warned at the resumed opening session of COP16 at the Food and Agriculture Organization headquarters in Rome on Tuesday, following the suspension of negotiations in Cali after 12 hours of talks. “With the world approaching dangerous tipping points, it is imperative that you reach agreement here in Rome on how biodiversity finance commitments will be honored. Success requires accountability. And action demands finance.”
A ‘slow burn‘
Progress-wise, things are still chugging along. In June, SBTN wrapped up its yearlong corporate target validation pilot with 17 multinational companies, including H&M Group, LVMH, Kering and Tesco. Its purpose was to put participants through the paces of assessing and prioritizing their environmental impacts before setting freshwater and land targets. By the end of the scheme, 90 percent of the companies were able to complete the first two steps for their selected organizational boundary and 71 percent for step three. Ten of them ultimately received validation on one or more freshwater targets and seven on all required land targets.
One major learning was that companies setting targets must improve their understanding of their value chains, including who their suppliers are and where they operate. Kering, despite its traceability efforts over the years, still found a need to ramp up supplier engagement because it leans on numerous artisanal suppliers and small-scale operations across multiple tiers. In the face of what appeared like an onslaught of possible data, several businesses found success in focusing on one unit—in a conglomerate’s case, a single brand—or a specific geography. And even then there were plenty of gaps. H&M, for instance, discovered that local water basin models and data were “widely missing” from its priority areas.
“It gets very complicated in terms of how to manage and deal with these things and what companies are used to,” said Michael Burgass, director of the biodiversity consultancy firm Biodiversify, which is part of SBTN’s Global Commons Alliance. “A lot of companies aren’t really comfortable with the concepts yet, and supply chains in fashion are also very opaque. For retailers or brands, quite often they don’t know where they’re potentially sourcing from at that Tier 4 level or endpoint.”
The discomfort has shown up in the numbers, too. Nearly 7,300 companies have set science-based targets with SBTi, with a further 1,600 aiming for net zero. In contrast, only three made it to SBTN’s first tranche of public adoptees, which it announced in October. Kering, the only fashion name among them, was also the only one to embrace the first-ever science-based targets for both freshwater and land.
“We take our role seriously as a first mover supporting pioneering solutions,” Rachel Kolbe Semhoun, the Gucci and Saint Laurent parent’s head of sustainable sourcing and nature initiatives, wrote in an email. “Through our work in regenerating over 1 million hectares of landscapes within our value chain, we also know full well that freshwater and land are key to the resilience of our supply chains and our business resilience overall. So, it was also an obvious strategic move for us to enhance our climate and biodiversity strategies with very precise, science-based targets for freshwater and land along our value chain.”
Semhoun said that the challenge now lies in engaging stakeholders within these diverse landscapes to work together according to shared solutions and goals, though she is hopeful that the SBTN framework, among others, will help “get everyone on the same page” with generating the kind of data that will “help all of us move towards a more positive impact.”
That SBTN is still in the process of rolling out a fully fleshed-out framework could be another reason for the hesitancy in uptake. Unlike with carbon emissions, there isn’t the equivalent of the Greenhouse Gas Protocol to provide a globally recognized standard for companies to latch onto. The pilot was also the first time that brands were able to go through the validation process, and the number of participants was capped as a matter of practicality. Burgass described the process of creating consensus as a “bit of a slow burn,” with everyone “learning as they go.” He said that the companies that are moving faster, like Kering, are also the ones investing more in resource allocation, for example by hiring in-house corporate biodiversity managers.
Franklin Holley, director of regenerative agriculture at the sustainability consultancy Anthesis Group, appreciates the rigor of formal processes and, in her former role as director of sustainable fashion at Conservation International, has helped develop many of them. But she said it’s also important that businesses not take a wait-and-see approach, as tempting as it might be.
“There is a pretty extensive amount of supply chain information and visibility, transparency and, in some cases, traceability,” she said. “But we would like to see, in parallel, companies finding ways to tackle the science-based process, and if that means making assumptions and working with solutions providers that can help identify where those risk areas are, so they can be set on a good pathway and start taking action.”
Holley said that SBTN’s first two steps—again, assessing and prioritizing—can be “really helpful and illustrative.” She works with clients to answer preliminary questions: What are you sourcing? Where do you think you’re sourcing it from? How much are you talking about? From there, companies can extrapolate what their impact might look like and how to connect strategies that could ultimately ladder up to a science-based target, which would be the “best in class.”
“SBTN has done a lot for just raising the profile of nature, but I personally have a bias toward action, and these are systems-level processes and changes that need to be addressed on the ground with local communities and Indigenous peoples, for example,” she said. “I don’t want to limit action in the case that companies may be feeling like they’re not ready to set a target yet publicly. There are other ways to engage.”
Holley’s biggest advice? Find a trusted partner because there is no reason to go it alone. Partnerships, in fact, are critical, when it comes to implementing and delivering on targets. And while Kering might be the first fashion purveyor to publicly incorporate science-based targets for nature, it’s not going to remain the only one, she said. It’ll just take some time.
Billman agreed that the urgency to set science-based targets for nature will only become more acute, especially for an industry like fashion.
“In general, the sectors that more directly see their impacts and dependencies on nature are further along in the journey of awareness than the sectors that aren’t, and fashion is one of the high-impact sectors,” she said. “I think we, as a human race, have had the luxury of being kind of disconnected from dependency on the natural world and that is changing rapidly with the increased material risks are being presented.”
Jensen understands why there might be skepticism around this new batch of science-based targets when the more ubiquitous climate ones are floundering. What’s important, she said, is getting to critical mass so that action naturally follows in lockstep with better data and better modeling. In short, “just get on with it.”
“It’s about building that muscle within the industry and beyond of recognizing that we’re going to follow the science, and then we’ll go from there. And that could mean that some of the targets need to change. That could also mean the activities done by organizations need to change,” she said. “The answer is not to stop working toward these targets. We have enough data to know we should be doing these things one way or another, even if the science is imperfect, even as those methods continue to evolve.”
