Femnet e.V.

The role of the global apparel and footwear industries has shifted far beyond meeting a basic human need. The relationship with fashion in our modern lives has had a collateral and significant impact on our planet’s resources.

As we face urgent environmental and social challenges caused by climate change and resource depletion, the efficacy of solutions will depend on the creativity, innovation and boldness so characteristic of the fashion industry. It’s time for players to change the trajectory. This report encourages actors in the industry to set ambitious, evidence-based environmental impact reduction goals to drive meaningful change to secure a more sustainable future for fashion.

With a view to drive bold Climate Action from the apparel and footwear industries, Quantis carried out a comprehensive study of the environmental impacts across both industries’ value chains. The

core objective is to inform on the current state of these industries’ environmental performance and provide robust data to inform and empower them to use a science-based approach to reduce their impact (for example, by aligning with the Science Based Targets initiative or other leading initiatives). A special focus is put on greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions as well as water impact.

Stemming from this overarching ambition, the goals of the present study were defined as follows:

• Quantify the apparel industry’s global environmental impacts across various indicators
• Assess data gaps to be addressed in further studies
• Study both historic and future data points to highlight trends and compare corresponding impact growth rates
• Provide key data-driven takeaways that can be used to promote industry-wide environmental progress of the apparel and footwear industries

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Tearfund and Baptist World Aid’s Ethical Fashion Report has returned for 2018, allowing consumers to assess information on 407 different international and local fashion brands.

This is the fifth report produced by Baptist World Aid Australia examining labour rights management systems in the fashion industry. It grades 114 companies (covering these 407 brands), from A to F, on the strength of their policies, traceability and transparency and systems to mitigate against the risks of forced labour, child labour and exploitation in their supply chains.

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Climate change, population growth, and shortages of key resources are already affecting the industry and they will bring profound changes over the next 15 years. By 2025 there are expected to be another billion people living on this planet and twice as many elderly people. Climate change will have major impacts on agriculture and patterns of global land use. Many communities will change radically, affecting the needs of the industry’s customers and the availability of labour. Demand for energy, water and food will grow, prices are likely to rise, and control of resources will be a key political issue. Other factors will shape our world in less predictable ways. China, India and other emerging economies will change global patterns of trade and power and exercise a growing cultural influence. Technology will continue to transform our lives and businesses and create new opportunities – think of the impact the internet has had in the last 15 years. People’s attitudes to resource shortages, climate change and sustainability, and their levels of disposable income, will affect consumer demand. How governments act, or fail to act, on trade, economics, the environment and poverty, and how they coordinate action on these and other global issues will also have a huge impact. They cover a wide range of issues and pose some searching questions: The future is likely to be dramatically different from today. We have created four scenarios, exploring the challenges ahead for the fashion industry and its current business models.

• How will the industry react to shortages of cotton and other raw materials?
• How could the fashion workforce be affected by shifting supply chains and technological development?
• How might technology influence fashion and change the way it is produced and sold?
• How will people care for their clothes in a future of water shortages and high energy prices?
• How could reuse and remanufacturing of clothing develop as a response to higher demand and prices?

The four scenarios explore worlds where globalisation has progressed or gone into reverse and where society and its fashions change more rapidly than today.

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Deloitte Access Economics has been engaged by Oxfam Australia to provide analysis of Australia’s garment industry. Specifically, Oxfam has requested Deloitte Access Economics answer two specific questions:

• Current factory wages: What is the typical share of the overall price to Australian consumers of garments produced in global supply chains which is spent on factory worker wages?

• Living wages: How much would the overall cost of bringing a garment to Australian consumers increase if a living wage were instead paid to factory workers?

• Using previous research, publicly available data, and data from several Australian businesses, Deloitte Access Economics has put together a cost structure framework of Australia’s garment supply industry. This framework represents the whole industry as an average and is not representative of a specific business or garment.

• Deloitte Access Economics has also estimated the impact on retail prices of moving towards a living wage. This analysis assumes that all players within the supply chain pass on the full cost of the wage increase. This does not answer how businesses could adjust their operations or how a living wage could practically be implemented.

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This report presents the findings of a large-scale, nationally representative survey of sexual harassment in the Cambodian garment industry. It combines quantitative survey data from 1,287 workers across 52 factories, with 25 qualitative interviews and 9 focus groups conducted in a variety of different living and working environments. Specifically, the objectives of the study were to:

1. Estimate the prevalence of sexual harassment reported by female and male workers
2. Estimate the annual cost of productivity lost to the garment industry due to sexual harassment affecting its workers by estimating indirect costs of turnover, absenteeism and presenteeism (direct and indirect tangible costs)
3. Examine the harmful negative effects of sexual harassment experienced by female and male workers

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