UNEP

A UNEP-led integrated programme (IP) has been launched to promote sustainable supply chains in the fashion industry in a bid to address the impact of the sector on biodiversity loss, chemicals and waste, climate change, international waters, and land degradation.

It is not just an irony, but an outright travesty that this needs to be emphasised: the second-hand clothing sector does indeed generate jobs in a region where millions live below the International Poverty Line of $2.15 a day. A study that looked at SHC in Angola, Guinea-Bissau, Malawi, Mozambique and Zambia explored a facet that anti-waste activists unfortunately choose to ignore.

The Nairobi session of the United Nations Environment Assembly (UNEA-6) has called on governments to facilitate a Global Textiles Policy Dialogue to urgently scale up policy efforts that minimise negative impacts of the textiles value chain on nature, people and economies.

The Sixth UN Environment Assembly in February will focus on the need for a policy dialogue and coordination mechanism to give cohesion and support the upscaling of current policy efforts to minimise negative impacts on nature, people and economies of the textile value chain.

A Global Plastics Treaty that seeks to protect human health and the environment from the adverse effects of plastic pollution, based on a comprehensive approach that addresses the full life cycle of plastic through the prevention, progressive reduction and remediation of plastic pollution, management and utilisation of plastic and plastic waste according to national priorities by 2040, is closer to reality.

The UNEP report — Sustainability and Circularity in the Textile Value Chain: A Global Roadmap — published earlier this year has been updated with seven annexes that offer specific advice, key actions, and priorities that stakeholders can adopt to advance the textile sector towards circularity.

The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) has outlined three priorities to deliver system change in the textiles value chain, and identified a roadmap that proposes nine ‘building blocks’ that could shape a sustainable and circular textiles value chain.

The theme of the just concluded COP27 was a focus on implementation. The pledges agreed upon in the past must give way to rapid action on tackling climate change and preparing for its effects. This also includes fashion companies, which are experts at talking the talk, but slow to walk the walk. A first-person account from the event.

The Fashion Industry Target Consultation project, a multi-stakeholder initiative, which aims to identify and converge existing industry aligned targets, has been launched at the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP27), now under way at the Red Sea resort city of Sharm el-Sheikh.

The just released UN Environment Programme’s ‘Sustainable Fashion: Communication Strategy 2021–24’ sets the context for the issues the industry is facing as well as the landscape in which it finds itself both from a consumer insights and policy perspective.