Between fashion and climate, events tend to bleed one into another as the topics become increasingly linked.
Coming off of their first joint event last week in Singapore that drew hundreds, the Sustainable Apparel Coalition and Global Fashion Agenda are among those announcing new partnerships at Cop27.
“The [Global Fashion Summit] has undergone great transformation over the years to shift from dialogues around why the industry must act, to presenting how the industry must act,” explained Federica Marchionni, chief executive officer of presenting partner the Global Fashion Agenda.
GFA is set to host three Cop27 events and started out by unveiling Tuesday an exciting project in collaboration with The United Nations Environment Program called the “Fashion Industry Target Consultation.” The project will be a multi-stakeholder initiative led by GFA.
Together, GFA and UNEP invite value chain stakeholders to share their insights in a voluntary online survey on GFA’s website until February 2023. After feedback is gathered, the groups will share an analysis and common targets in the 2023 publication of GFA’s “CEO Agenda” (likened to a guidepost for executives) at Global Fashion Summit’s Copenhagen edition in June 2023. The process is meant to be a transparent means for aligning key performance indicators in fashion. Starting in 2023, progress will be published in what’s called The GFA Monitor.
“The [Global Fashion Summit] is just one avenue through which we cultivate change,” said Marchionni. “As another example, our impact programs including the Circular Fashion Partnership and the Global Circular Fashion Forum exist to facilitate tangible change on the ground. Through new partnerships we have in the pipeline to launch at Cop27, we endeavor to really push the industry forward in a unified route of travel.”
A steering force in sustainable fashion, the Sustainable Apparel Coalition, or SAC, is also braced for upcoming change. At the event, the SAC is setting the industry’s baseline for GHG emissions and the interventions needed in order to deliver on a 45 percent reduction by 2030.
“Both organizations [the SAC and GFA] are in agreement that there is an urgent need to define ‘better’ data and close data gaps,” Amina Razvi, SAC executive director, told WWD. “Over the last decade, the SAC together with its members have gathered a wealth of verified data, which has led to increased transparency and enabled more informed decisions. However, more is urgently needed to fill existing gaps.”
Both Razvi and Marchionni will speak in a “Race to Zero” event at Cop27 this week for The Fashion Industry Charter for Climate Action. The Fashion Charter requires its company signatories to set a 1.5 degree aligned GHG emission reduction target that includes scope 3 emissions from purchased goods and services.
Razvi said at Cop27, the SAC “will be continuing to ramp up our efforts to engage with stakeholders and engage in discussions on how to accelerate action and impact to transform the industry.”
Existing collaborations will also continue into 2023, per Razvi, and ongoing assessments on SAC’s contested sustainability tools are expected “early next year.”