At the Yee Chain factory in Taiwan, sustainability lead Anett Sóti is bracing for another year of environmental chaos. Among her primary concerns are flooding in the low-lying garment production hubs of Ho Chi Minh City and the Mekong Delta, and forest fires and unpredictable storms in Indonesia, which would threaten the tree farms Yee Chain relies on for viscose production.
“We expect a higher frequency of workdays lost for assembly workers who will struggle to commute,” she says. In Taiwan, even getting products on shelves on time could be a problem: “The recent years showed us that the intensity of the typhoons can hit the island’s northern ports to the point that it can lead to shipping delays.”
The situation is similar in Europe, where it is quickly dawning on fashion suppliers that climate breakdown is no longer an abstract risk, but a very present reality. Extreme heat is endangering garment workers, floods and wildfires are damaging raw material production, while water stress is disrupting farming and industrial processes. “The reality of climate change is there,” says Eva von Alvensleben, executive director of The Fashion Pact. “The urgency is higher than ever.”
Climate unpredictability is here to stay, and combined with global conflicts, tariff shocks, and the scaling back of Western sustainability regulations, many brands are waking up to the reality that they must react, and a much-needed reset of fashion’s climate agenda appears to be underway. After years of setting top-down targets that leave manufacturers to absorb the cost and complexity of change, industry representatives say that climate action is becoming more pragmatic, more local, and increasingly led by those in the supply chain itself.
Can the industry make up for lost time with this less performative, more grounded approach? And crucially, can it protect the people in its supply chains most vulnerable to climate change’s harms?
From global promises to country-level solutions
The top-down climate playbook, where brands set big, global targets and suppliers do the work with little input, is quietly fading. What’s changing is not just that suppliers are co-designing solutions, but that climate action is now more focused and situated in the supply chain, where most impacts unravel.
“The previous model of getting brands together to align on what to tell suppliers to do has shifted toward a more equal partnership,” says Lewis Perkins, CEO of the Apparel Impact Institute (Aii). Aii’s focus for 2026 is on high-impact solutions in Tier 2 manufacturing, where Perkins says just “a few hundred suppliers” account for well over half of the sector’s emissions, due to energy-intensive dyeing and finishing processes that are often powered by coal. But each factory will have different roadblocks, he says. “There’s no cookie-cutter approach,” says Perkins. “It’s about having to meet them where their needs are.”
The Apparel and Textile Transformation Initiative (ATTI) is advancing what project lead Olivia Windham Stewart calls “nationally grounded” action on sustainability challenges, including climate change. The group, which launched chapters last year in Türkiye and Bangladesh, convenes national-level industry associations to decide what topics are most urgent, before designing context-specific solutions that take local regulations, financing, and resources into consideration. Türkiye, for example, is focusing on energy and water, while the Bangladeshi chapter, led by BGMEA and its knitwear counterpart BKMEA, is identifying areas of focus this year.
“Manufacturer-led, country-level transformation plans are not simply helpful; they are an essential mechanism for translating ambition into implementation,” says Windham Stewart.
The Fashion Producer Collective, a manufacturer-led sustainability think tank, is focusing on the hyper-local challenges of adaptation, says co-creator Kim van der Weerd. For example, one member is redesigning their manufacturing company’s gutter system to factor in much heavier rainfalls, which might require custom-designing a new system and finding ways to finance it. “All of these are extremely contextual questions whose answers will differ from factory to factory,” says van der Weerd.
Action is also spreading to the Global North’s historically less scrutinized but still emissions-intensive supply chains. The Fashion Pact has launched the European Accelerator to address emissions in Italy’s supply chain, the EU’s largest manufacturing hub, and a center of luxury production.
While coal has mostly been phased out, energy-intensive wet processing is a huge emitter in Italy’s mills and tanneries, says Ségolène de Donno, who leads the initiative. The group plans to target energy-intensive hotspots such as wet processing this year, she says, alongside financial barriers faced by Italy’s many small, family-owned manufacturing companies. “We know that a key barrier for action is the financing, so the brands, together with their suppliers, aim to understand where to go and how to actually ask for financing.”
Just transition: The next frontier of climate action?
Experts say the life-and-death impacts on workers in the supply chain are the most urgent concern. Reports of deadly flooding and extreme heat in garment supply chains have made fashion’s human toll impossible to ignore.
Research by Cornell’s Global Labor Institute found that the industry could face billions of dollars in lost productivity by 2030, due to extreme heat and flooding in just four Asian countries alone. The global figure will be much higher. “Climate adaptation will keep moving up the priority list because it’s getting hotter,” says Jason Judd, the institute’s executive director. “Attention to the impact of climate change on workers and profits has jumped.”
The institute’s latest report, Cooling Before It Got Cool, also offers cautious optimism. Many of the effective heat-mitigation measures it analyzes are relatively simple and affordable, ranging from ice machines and exhaust fans to evaporative cooling walls that draw cooler air across water-soaked pads. “The technology to cool workers is not complicated, and the costs are manageable in most countries,” says Judd. And while some heat adaptation measures — such as air conditioning systems — risk driving up emissions, others reinforce climate goals. One factory in the report, for example, uses solar panels not only to generate energy, but to block out heat that pours through the factory roof.
Crucially, the research finds that these measures are most effective when workers play an active role in shaping them. In Cambodia, Athit Kong, a trade union leader with the Coalition of Cambodian Apparel Workers’ Democratic Union (C.CAWDU), says unions are working with employers like Sabrina Garments in the Kampong Speu Province, to monitor factory temperatures and embed heat protections. As described in the Cornell report, C.CAWDU workers at Sabrina Garments helped to log overheated pockets of the factory, like those near machinery, using the Telegram app, so that the employer could better target its cooling efforts.
As a result of that worker-led momentum, the International Accord — a binding agreement between brands, governments, and labor unions operating in Bangladesh and Pakistan — is developing a Heat Stress Protocol, which will apply across covered factories. The accord already has a worker complaint mechanism that logs heat stress (including incidents of heat stroke and a lack of clean drinking water), says the accord’s deputy director, Véronique Camerer, but the protocol will “address heat risk in a more systemic manner”. Further details are expected later this year.
Sharing the cost of climate action — and adaptation?
Asking brands to pay their fair share is a common refrain, but it’s a demand that has often gone unheeded. With sustainability budgets tight and consumer demand down, the money to clean up fashion seems unlikely to materialize this year. But by focusing on the highest-impact areas and pooling resources, the industry is starting to move the needle.
Aii, for example, is currently expanding its Deployment Gap Grant program from pilot to full-scale implementation. The program brings brands together to pool capital and help cover the upfront costs suppliers might face when undertaking decarbonization measures, like installing solar-powered heat pumps for thermal energy instead of coal. “The idea is to use shared pools of funding to effectively act as a rebate for suppliers,” says Aii’s Perkins. “This way, everyone has real skin in the game.”
The Fashion Pact, a CEO-led coalition of mostly European fashion companies, is also scaling its Future Supplier Initiative, developed with Aii and professional services firm Guidehouse, and which brings big brands together to help factories secure loans by putting up capital “guarantees” that attract banks and help secure better terms. The project spent its first years developing the loan proposals, and this year, the proposals will be rolled out into real-world funded projects. H&M, Gap Inc., Bestseller, and Ralph Lauren are among the growing participant list, alongside 50 suppliers.
While climate action accelerates, advocacy organizations and suppliers are concerned that the demands to decarbonize are ignoring impacts on workers. Adaptation — which arguably has a much more direct impact on workers — is being overlooked, as are price cuts and other harmful purchasing practices that can lead to layoffs or sped-up production.
Tariffs and economic uncertainty have led some brands to cut prices to factories, even as sustainability demands increase. Any increased costs can lead to cutbacks in other critical areas, such as worker well-being, explains Saqib Sohail, head of engagement at the Microfibre Consortium and former head of social responsibility at Artistic Milliners, a Pakistan-based producer. “What we have seen is added pressure on the suppliers by the retailers and the sourcing teams,” he says, leading to layoffs and other cuts.
The Business and Human Rights Center (BHRC) is urging brands to include worker welfare and just transition commitments in their climate plans. After its Missing Thread report, released in June, it is tracking climate commitments of 65 large fashion companies, including Amazon, Kering, and Adidas, through follow-up surveys, looking at whether brands are backing decarbonization efforts with fair purchasing prices, financial support for decarbonization, and support for collective bargaining, which in turn protects workers. They also look at heat stress commitments.
“A just transition, in practice, requires green requirements to be aligned with fair pricing, longer-term sourcing commitments, and worker voice through freedom of association and collective bargaining, so that climate action does not translate into sped-up production, layoffs, suppressed wages, or unsafe working conditions,” says BHRC labor rights project manager Anithra Varia.
BHRC’s focus groups of garment workers and unions in Bangladesh and Cambodia found that new, more efficient machinery is also more productive, which can lead to layoffs and even higher production targets for workers. Women are often less likely to be trained on these machines. Workers in Bangladesh told researchers that decarbonized factories are important, but should only be called green when they are “also green for workers”.
This more expansive, human-centered view of climate action is perhaps the most ambitious — and urgent — goal the industry will grapple with this year.
