What is known is that volatile climate change the world over is impacting the fashion industry and a report warns that if four key hubs of garment production fail to make adaptation investments, nearly one million new apparel and footwear jobs will be foregone by 2030.
- These losses swing out to 68% and eight million jobs by 2050. As climate change accelerates, it is possible that these projections underestimate the scale and speed of losses and harms.
- The report—Hot Air: How will fashion adapt to accelerating climate change?—by the ILR Global Labor Institute contends that the falloff in (nominal) earnings by 2030 could be 22% across four key producers—Bangladesh, Cambodia, Pakistan and Vietnam.
- The report, authored by Jason Judd, Brian Wakamo, Colin P Evans and Sarosh Kuruvilla, tracks accelerations in extreme heat and intense precipitation since 2005 in apparel and footwear production centres to understand where, how, and how quickly climate impacts are changing.
- As heatwaves and flooding intensify, the report observes “from a high level” changes across nearly two dozen centres and, more closely, the changes in five production centres that featured in its 2023 ‘Higher Ground?’ analyses—Dhaka, Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh City, Karachi and Phnom Penh.
- The report analysed changes in heat-stress risk using both dry- and wet-bulb measures, and also analysed how heat— especially wet bulb globe temperatures (WGBT) and heat waves—have been intensifying in major garment producing centres over the past 20 years, upending the lives of garment workers.
- Besides, flooding has been getting worse over the past two decades, and the report talks about the need for adaptation and how well prepared major apparel producing nations are for climate change.
FASHION’S HEAT BELT: The average number of high-heat days on which daily maximum outdoor temperatures topped 35 °C (95 °F) has increased in 17 of 23 cities by over 10% over the last 20 years.
- Cities including Karachi, Ho Chi Minh, Managua, Amman and Prato (Italy) saw consistent and significant increases in exceedance days over each of the five-year periods
- Tiruppur and Colombo also saw significant increases from 2005–2009 exceedance day averages with a slight decrease in the most recent period. But many cities—Delhi is an example—saw significant swings in exceedance day averages from period to period, attributable in part to the short-term variability in weather patterns.
- Finally, two cities—Izmir and Mexico City—saw noticeable and consistent decreases across all the periods
CHANGES IN HEAT STRESS: Heat stress for apparel workers in the focus cities is accelerating and that heat waves are, on the whole, more frequent.
- This report uses a combined index of outdoor heat and relative humidity, the wet bulb globe temperature (WBGT), as a measure of heat stress for workers. Heat-stress moves from ‘discomfort’ for apparel workers—even for acclimatised workers—at 28 °C (WBGT) to ‘moderate’ at 30.5 °C (WBGT), and high heat stress at 32 °C (WBGT).
- At the ‘moderate’ heat stress threshold, the ILO recommends that workers rest as much as they work in an hour—that is, 30 minutes of work require 30 minutes of rest—in order to allow their bodies to recover.
- At the upper reaches of the WBGT index, workers can suffer exhaustion, fainting, heat stroke and worse.
- Heat stress shows up too in worker productivity and output. Analyses in the academic literature on work and heat estimates that for every increase of 1 °C above 25 °C WBGT, productivity for moderate effort manufacturing work decreases by an average of 1.5%.
- Across its five focus centres, the trend is ever-higher wet-bulb ‘exceedance days’—days on which WBGT exceed the moderate heat stress threshold of 30.5 °C.
- Karachi, Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh experienced the most notable rises since 2005, with Karachi peaking at 115 exceedance days in 2020.
- And four of the five cities, excepting Hanoi, have been reaching towards new heat stress levels over the past two years.
