LONDON, United Kingdom — It’s 2050. The Arctic Circle, Earth’s once-pristine white snowcap, is now green. Its melting snowdrifts have been replaced with an irrepressible moss. Just south, across the formerly barren landscape of the Canadian tundra, a place in which permafrost prevented even trees from growing, enterprising cotton farmers are beginning to eke out low-yield harvests, having shifted production from America’s southern states which have been blighted by droughts and the ravages of monoculture on soil quality.
Environmental disruption has caused the price of cotton to spike by more than 2,000 percent. Its production also faces stiffer regulation in its use of fresh water, now so scarce it is becoming a commodity in itself. In Asia, rising sea levels have displaced millions of garment manufacturers and destabilised major industrial ports including Shanghai and Mumbai, and their trading partners New York and Miami.
By 2050, the materials used by the fashion industry — as well as its operational structures, global trade networks and workforce — could be unrecognisable if just a few of the wide-ranging predictions made by scientists come true.
Fashion's need for raw materials and labour intensive production processes make it an industry particularly vulnerable to environmental disruption — as are the profit margins of businesses that operate within it. “Based on conservative projections, fashion brands’ profitability levels are at risk by at least three percentage points if they don’t act determinedly soon,” says Javier Seara, the lead author of the Boston Consulting Group and the Global Fashion Agenda’s sustainability focused report, "The Pulse of the Fashion Industry." Certainly, inaction on climate change could result in radical risk-taking. But what are the most pressing threats to fashion businesses, and what is the industry doing about them?
1. Cost of Raw Materials
The fashion industry has evolved using a linear model when it comes to raw materials, often expressed as "take, make, and waste." However, as is becoming emphatically clear, some of the resources fashion relies upon to create its goods are finite, most critically — fresh water. Dyeing and treatment processes use vast amounts of water; to make a pair of jeans and a t-shirt takes 20,000 litres according to the WWF. Over 70 percent of that water usage is in the agriculture of cotton, which is among the fabrics with the highest environmental impact along with silk, wool and leather.
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