At the Copenhagen Global Fashion Summit Wednesday, the University of Cambridge released its report on nature-based targets for fashion.
Cambridge’s sustainability institute, or CISL, jointly released the report with French President Emmanuel Macron’s Fashion Pact (which represents a third of the industry) intended as a primer on setting a science-based — and nature-positive — framework for biodiversity in fashion. More than 60 fashion companies were involved in the report, including Kering, H&M Group, Chanel, Burberry and Adidas.
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Nature-positive is defined as an ambitious goal and future state of nature that is better than the present through means of biodiversity or conservation. The pay-to-access report addresses fashion’s heavy dependence on natural resources and accompanied a webinar and in-person session at the GFS Summit. The report includes a cradle-to-gate primer on determining and measuring impact along the value chain (up to retail), a guide to material sourcing and guidance for working with technical experts and industry collaborators. (Though phases like consumer use and resale are currently out of scope, the report said future iterations are “expected to change”).
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The report is part of a two-year project, wrapping this week, called “Transforming the Fashion Sector With Nature” and funded by a $2 million grant from the Global Environment Facility, co-executed by Conservation International and The Fashion Pact. These biodiversity targets trail similar calls-to-action in the past few years such as those from Textile Exchange, Canopy, the Carbon Disclosure Project, and most recently, the Science Based Targets Initiative.
Under its Science Based Targets Network, SBTi formally released science-based targets for nature in May. To note, the Science-Based Targets Network, The Fashion Pact, Conservation International and Textile Exchange collaborated on this latest effort, which calls on fashion to adopt the SBTN’s five-step nature-based targets, including to assess, interpret and prioritize, measure, set and disclose, act and track.
In practice, this guidance spans activities like identifying crude oil or petroleum inputs and other “high impact commodities” (including paper pulp, iron, zinc, steel, leather, cotton, liquefied natural gas) or not cutting down forests or polluting water, among other location-specific criteria. These are practices already seen in industries like construction.
As WWD reported, well over half (or 61 percent) of Fashion Pact members have either “committed to set” science-based targets or already had their targets approved. Per a 2022 grant progress report, 24 Fashion Pact signatories (out of 100 companies) said they planned to align with the SBTN framework.
Eliot Whittington, chief systems change officer at the University of Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership, said the hope is to offer the fashion sector “clear guidance on what it needs to do” to deter deepening an existing ecological crisis.