Fashion is the second-most polluting industry in the world. Companies like Nike, Louis Vuitton, Gucci, Reebok, H&M, Zara and others together contribute to nearly 10 percent of annual greenhouse gas emissions, according to reports.
Most of the rise in emissions in the fashion industry has been due to the increasing popularity of fast fashion and the rapid rise in fashion purchases by middle-income groups.
But, as the world becomes climate-conscious, brands are also eager to present themselves as part of the group. With consumers increasingly becoming resistant to purchase products and services from those they think are destroying the planet, it is in the companies’ best interests to become climate-conscious. Or at least present themselves as climate-friendly through flawed reporting.
A Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) was established to help companies and other organisations publish their carbon emissions. The international non-profit tries to encourage companies to reduce their emissions by scoring their progress in the reduction of emissions.
Companies like H&M and Nike have made claims of an overall decrease in emissions while in reality, their emissions have been increasing, according to a Guardian report. This discrepancy is possibly due to the manner in which CDP calculates scores.
It calculates the gross emissions of a company but only against its total revenue in a year. In essence, a company can get scored for decreasing their overall emission levels just by having a larger increase in their revenue, the report explained.
Nike, for example, reported a net emission increase of 1 percent YoY in FY 2019 but it was “was offset by 7 percent year-on-year revenue growth, resulting in over a 5 percent drop in emissions per revenue,” per the company’s climate change report in the year 2020.
The CDP awarded Nike an ‘A-’ for the year. H&M similarly reported an increase in gross emissions but as its revenues increased at a higher rate than emissions, it too reported an overall decrease in emissions in 2017 and 2018.
“Celebrating the success of this sort of relative decoupling is a recipe for disaster,” said James Dyke, an associate professor in Earth system science at the University of Exeter. “Global warming will stop when we stop pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Nike having a few million more in the bank doesn’t change that.”
The standards and methodology used by CDP and the Science-Based Targets initiative (SBTi), which is a CDP, the United Nations Global Compact, World Resources Institute and the World Wide Fund for Nature was critisised by Bill Baue, one of the founders of the SBTi. The SBTi was established to help companies align their emission goals with the standards set by Paris Climate Accords.
“Science-Based Targets is not a science-based approach,” Baue told Climate Home News. “I believe in this instance that SBTi… are putting their own interest above the interests of the public.”
“To quell the great public skepticism about this initiative, what’s needed is an additional emphasis on transparency and accountability, using the latest science to guide these targets, and for these companies to back up their targets with their investment plans,” Jennifer Morgan, executive director at Greenpeace International, told Climate Home News.
(Edited by : Kanishka Sarkar)
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