The Frayed Edge: Are All Sustainability Certifications Broken?

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Hello and happy Friday. This week we’re taking a look at sustainability certifications and why so many are under fire. Is the whole system just broken? Let’s discuss. In case you missed it, I also wanted to highlight the fantastic story BoF reporter Shayeza Walid wrote this week, unpacking how Trump’s trade war is unravelling the lives of India’s garment workers. If you haven’t read it yet, I highly suggest you do. Finally, I have you covered with a quick cheat sheet on things you don’t want to miss in the run up to the United Nation’s COP climate summit in a couple of weeks.

As always, send me thoughts, feedback, tips and questions.

Are All Sustainability Certifications Broken?

This week was the Forest Stewardship Council’s general assembly.

That may not have been an event long marked on your calendars, but here’s why it caught my eye: The FSC is widely seen as the gold standard for responsible forestry certification, giving the nearly 2,000 companies that use it cover from links to deforestation and the climate, biodiversity and indigenous rights violations that accompany it.

This matters to fashion because the industry actually uses a lot of wood. Think bamboo, viscose or rayon and your supply chain probably starts in a forest somewhere. Then there’s all the cardboard and paper packaging the industry uses. If a brand has even a modicum of interest in basic eco virtue signalling, you better believe their stuff is FSC certified.

So, back to this week’s general assembly, where all is not entirely well.

The 30-year-old forest protection scheme is under pressure to tighten up and modernise its processes, amid allegations of widespread fraud that have dragged on for years.

Ahead of the meeting, environmental nonprofit Earthsight put out a blast listing nearly a dozen cases of fraud dating back to 2017. A former FSC integrity director said in a recent interview that during his time at the organisation (a decade-long stretch that lasted until 2021), he estimated that as much as one third of claims were false. (In a statement published on its website, the FSC said this was based on outdated information and does not reflect its current system).

Ikea, a staunch supporter of the initiative, published a manifesto on what needs to change for the FSC to remain “fit for the future,” calling among other things for better verification, more transparency and greater inclusivity.

Wait, this feels familiar

Yes, painfully so.

Think of a sustainability standard used by the fashion industry and more likely than not it’s suffered some scandal that has called into question its integrity and substance as a marker of good practice in recent years.

Organic cotton has also been beset by fraud allegations. High-performing B Corp brands are ditching the scheme, arguing it’s become too permissive in letting big polluters benefit from its certification. The Science Based Targets Initiative, the world’s premier certifier of corporate climate goals, spent last year mired in a bruising debate over whether companies should be allowed to use controversial carbon offsets to help meet their environmental goals.

So… trust no one?

Inevitably, it’s much more complicated than that.

Advocates would argue that the tensions bubbling up around sustainability standards and certifications reflect a necessary process of maturation. Establishing widely agreed voluntary standards to police opaque and complex supply chains or govern an emerging system of climate metrics is inevitably messy, fractious and fraught with missteps. Many initiatives are adjusting to additional scrutiny that has come with scale and greater focus on whether big brands can stand up their environmental claims.

New technologies that improve transparency and traceability can help here (and make it easier for watchdogs to spot issues with compliance), but shifting industries takes time and a deft diplomatic touch to bring along a suite of stakeholders with vastly varying interests.

Cynics just raise a weary eyebrow and point to the fact that while these debates have been going on for decades, the underlying issues remain largely unresolved.

Still, in the absence of tougher regulations, these standards are the best we have and it makes sense to focus on making them as robust as possible.

The Human Cost of Trump’s Trade War

This week marked two months since the Trump administration hit India with 50 percent import duties, layering a punitive 25 percent tariff on top of existing customs fees in retaliation for the country’s ongoing purchases of Russian crude oil.

The steep duties make India one of the worst-hit victims of the Trump trade war. For many consumers in Western markets the fallout from America’s new tariff regimes may still feel abstract. There are no shortages of new fashion products to buy and brands have so far largely avoided major price increases. But for workers in India’s garment manufacturing hubs the impact has been swift and devastating.

As my colleague, Shayeza Walid, reported this week, factory labourers are facing mass layoffs, reduced hours and indefinite furloughs. Some have found temporary or piece-rate work elsewhere, while others have moved into the agricultural and construction sectors, labour groups say. In all cases, the pay is lower. In many, the work is less secure.

The crisis is landing on a workforce that has been under pressure for years, with many comparing the situation to the early months of the pandemic. Back then, livelihoods were threatened by a global health crisis, now they are under threat from decisions made in Washington DC.

It’s a must-read story and it’s only a microcosm of how things are playing out across garment producing hubs around the world.

The [factories] started telling us to go home for festival holidays and come back once things in America got better. They don’t know themselves if it will happen in two or three months, but for us even one month is a lifetime.

—  General secretary at Karnataka State Garment and Textile Workers Union Raju B. Chikkanarasaiya

COP Watch: Bill Gates, Deadly Heat and a Mixed View on Emissions

We’re just a little over a week out from the start of the UN’s annual COP summit, the 30th instalment of the world’s biggest diplomatic climate endeavour. This year’s meeting is both momentous and likely to be bitterly disappointing for environmental advocates.

It marks a decade since the Paris Agreement was reached, a crowning achievement for the COP process that established a worldwide deal to limit global heating. In its wake, companies and governments exuberantly committed to curb planet-warming emissions.

But things look rather different now. Almost everyone is off-track on achieving those well-meaning targets, and some major players (read the Trump administration) have abandoned them altogether. Ahead of this year’s COP, many in the climate space are doing some real soul searching on how to keep moving forward.

Here are a few things that caught my eye this week:

The Bill Gates Pivot

The Microsoft billionaire has become a big player in the climate conversation thanks to his investment in Breakthrough Energy Ventures, a group of funds he launched in 2015 to accelerate innovation in clean energy and other green technologies.

But this week he caused a stir, by calling on the UN to pivot its focus from emissions and temperature reduction to prioritise human health and welfare. Though climate change is serious, it’s “not civilisation ending,” the investor and philanthropist wrote in an open letter posted on his personal blog.

“We need to keep backing the breakthroughs that will help the world reach zero emissions. But we can’t cut funding for health and development — programs that help people stay resilient in the face of climate change — to do it,” Gates wrote. Next month’s COP “is a chance to refocus on the metric that should count even more than emissions and temperature change: improving lives,” he added.

Meanwhile, UN secretary general António Guterres warned of “devastating consequences” if the world overshoots its climate goals in his only interview ahead of the climate summit.

Too Hot to Handle

Hotter weather is killing more than half a million people a year, a more than 20 percent increase since the 1990s, according to a new study on climate and health by The Lancet.

The numbers come amid years of record-breaking heatwaves around the world, with the average person exposed to 16 days of dangerous heat that would not have been expected without climate change in 2024.

Higher temperatures have led to more food insecurity because of droughts and wildfires and economic losses of more than $1 trillion as hot workers were less productive, the report found.

“The climate crisis is a health crisis,” said Dr Jeremy Farrar, assistant director-general for health promotion and disease prevention and care at the World Health Organization, a strategic partner on the study. “Climate inaction is killing people now in all countries.”

Good News, Bad News

The world’s planet-warming greenhouse-gas emissions are expected to fall in the next decade, but not nearly fast enough, according to a UN tally of countries’ climate commitments.

If governments live up to their pledges, global emissions should fall by 10 percent by 2035, the first decline ever forecast by the UN, according to Bloomberg. But that’s still far off the reductions needed to keep global warming below the internationally agreed cap of 1.5C above pre-industrial levels.

At first glance, it might look like the US has exited the climate fight. The president is once again pulling the US out of the Paris Agreement, and he may not send an official US delegation to next month’s COP30 climate summit in Brazil. But don’t be confused: America is still in the arena; it’s just fighting for the other side.

—  Jennifer A Dlouhy and Akshat Rathi for Bloomberg

What Else You Need to Know This Week:

• Speak Up: After years of championing identity-led brands, founders are now grappling with a rise in conservatism among investors that’s putting LGBTQ+-owned businesses at risk. [The Business of Fashion]
• Et Tu, Disney: Disneyland Paris has cancelled its Christmas partnership with Parisian department store BHV, wading into a controversy over Shein opening one of its first permanent physical stores in the space. [Fashion United]
• The Impact Marketing Backlash: When a trendy activewear brand launched a line for Breast Cancer Awareness Month, pledging to donate 2 percent of proceeds to cancer research, consumers said it wasn’t enough. [The Wall Street Journal]
• Trump the Climate Bully: The world was on the brink of a climate milestone: adopting a global carbon tax for the shipping industry. Enter Donald Trump. The initiative is one of many that the US President is going after. [Bloomberg]