As fashion companies stay glued with textbook solutions on issues of water efficiency and water scarcity, there's a bigger threat that's looming large: flood risks and fast-depleting water quality.
- The grim warning comes in the WWF report, Avant Garde: Water risks and opportunities facing the apparel and textile clusters, published together with Open Supply Hub.
The Study: The researchers focused on 82 apparel clusters, which were identified as the basins (catchments) with highest spatial density of apparel and textiles sites.
- Altogether these clusters encompass over 75,000 sites (which represent 78% of all the sites that were listed in Open Supply Hub at the time of analysis).
Physical Water Risks: The study harnessed the WWF Water Risk Filter to assess the physical water risks associated with each cluster. Thus, they identified physical risks in the year 2020 (as the baseline) and also analysed how these risks will evolve by 2050 considering the changes in climate and socio-economics, according to a pessimistic pathway.
- The 82 clusters’ average physical risk is projected to change from 3.3 (medium risk) in 2020 to 3.7 (high risk) in 2050, considering the risk scale ranging from 1 (very low risk) to 5 (very high risk), or up to 6.6 in cases that future risk will be extreme.
- Specifically, 35 clusters (43%) face high or very high physical water risk as of 2020, but this number is projected to rise to 47 (57%) by 2050, with an additional 4 clusters (5%) projected to face extreme risk, namely Ludhiana, Ahmedabad and Delhi in India, and Lahore in Pakistan.
- Physical water risks are already high for many of the larger clusters.
- All of the largest clusters are projected to face increases in physical water risk by 2050, making it critical to prioritise basin resilience planning.
- The clusters most exposed to physical water risk are in India and Pakistan.
