Climate Week: It’s Time to Turn Advocacy into Action, Cascale Says
Fresh off the heels of Cascale’s annual meeting in Munich, the nonprofit held a casual gathering in New York City’s Garment District during Climate Week to continue the conversation on all things decarbonization.
Cascale was joined by leaders at collaborators, including Worldly and the Apparel Impact Institute (Aii), on Thursday morning to address the uncomfortable truth: the industry needs to get it together.
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Colin Browne, CEO of the multi-stakeholder group formerly known as the Sustainable Apparel Coalition, eased into that truth with a zeitgeist zinger.
“I love ‘Succession.’ I just love Logan Roy’s arrogance and audacity,” the former Under Armour executive said, noting that Roy tells his children he loves them, “but they are not serious people;” a line that hit home for Browne.
“It’s a really interesting quote from the point of view of where we are with regards to global sustainability and the environmental work we have in progress,” he continued. “I think that over the last 30 years—and reflecting on that—a lot of [that work] has been voluntary: passionate advocates committed to doing the right thing. You only get so far with voluntary measures and advocacy.”
The time to turn advocacy into action is “really starting to happen,” he said, and it’s going to fundamentally change the industry. The Higg Index creators essentially said the same thing last week in Germany, but fellow sustainability leaders in attendance weren’t concerned.
“I’ve been at many of these events, but this felt—for the first time—that we could have the difficult discussions,” Tamar Hoek, senior policy director for sustainable fashion at Solidaridad, said of the Munich event. “We could talk about what does not work and, more importantly, we could talk about how collaboration is key. If we put our egos aside as different organizations, we can probably create bigger impacts than when we work on our own.”
That said, “Chatting Climate & Consumer Goods” kicked off with a conversation centered around scaling decarbonization.
“The question isn’t if we have the technology to do it,” Browne said. “The question is, do we have the courage, capacity and commitment to get it done?”
Lewis Perkins, president of the Aii, thinks so.
“We know what to do. We have the right partners in place. We’ve got all the right people in the room,” Perkins said. “It’s a matter of just leaning into, like, the ‘unlock’ and we use that world a lot, but it is this catalytic action to lean into over the next five years—I’m very confident we have everything we need.”
And that can be summarized or understood, Perkins said, as several key components, such as aligning technical tools, developing the facility carbon benchmark and securing funding. This takes shape through data-driven decision-making, collaborative supply chain investments and predictable volume commitments.
Above all else, the urgency for action was underscored, calling for collective efforts to continue.
“We clearly have a snowball’s chance in hell of actually getting there if we don’t get moving,” Browne said. “Let’s be frank, guys. We’ve been talking about this for 30 years. Shit is about to get real.”
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