Can Shared Data Help Fix Fashion’s Climate Problem?

We’ve been tracking fashion’s climate commitments for long enough now to know what the numbers often show: real progress remains slower than expected.  According to the Apparel Impact Institute, the sector is only 8.6% of the way toward its 2030 emissions-reduction target, and total apparel-sector emissions actually rose by 7.5% in 2023. 

Those figures don’t diagnose the entire slowdown, but they point to a familiar pattern. Much of the difficulty still sits upstream, where suppliers are asked to report environmental data in formats that change from brand to brand. Definitions differ. Timeframes differ. Even basic units differ. That lack of coherence makes it difficult for anyone, brands, regulators, or manufacturers, to establish a clear picture of progress or to understand where interventions might have the greatest impact.

That’s the context behind a new initiative launched by The Fashion Pact,  a coalition of major brands including Kering, Moncler, Prada, and Chanel. The group has introduced a “European Accelerator” programme with one of its first actions focused on a shared environmental-data questionnaire for suppliers. It’s procedural work, and deliberately so, but it speaks directly to one of the cleanest structural gaps in fashion’s climate efforts: the industry still doesn’t have a common way to describe the environmental footprint of its supply chains.

The pilot, run over six weeks in Italy, tested that idea with 74 suppliers ranging from finished-product manufacturers to tanneries, mills, yarn producers, and accessories makers. Developed in collaboration with Camera Nazionale della Moda Italiana and supported by Quantis, the project asked a straightforward question: could one template replace the assortment of formats suppliers are routinely asked to complete?

Early indications suggest it might be able to do just that. Participating brands now have access to a single structure they can adopt in place of their individual requests. For suppliers, the benefit is just as immediate: fewer duplicate submissions and fewer variations of the same questions framed in slightly different ways. The accelerator is built to support both sides of that relationship.

The reason that matters becomes clear when looking at how supplier reporting works today. Most factories work with several brands simultaneously. A mill might log energy use in kilowatt-hours for one customer, carbon equivalents for another, and process-specific figures for a third. Water reporting might be split by site, by dyehouse, or by production stage depending on who is asking. Over the course of a year, many suppliers spend substantial time responding to requests that cover the same information but cannot be compared or combined. The result is predictable: accuracy varies, analysis becomes harder, and large-scale Scope 3 modelling drifts into guesswork.

This is more than an administrative inconvenience. It is one of the reasons climate progress remains difficult to measure. Brands struggle to model meaningful reduction pathways without consistent upstream information. Regulators struggle to assess compliance when inputs vary from one organisation to another. Suppliers struggle to improve when reporting demands grow faster than their capacity to manage them. In a sector built on shared production networks, inconsistent reporting creates friction that slows nearly every other effort.

The pressure to fix that is rising. Recent updates to the SBTi’s Corporate Net-Zero Standard direct companies to collect high-quality primary data from suppliers and other value-chain partners for material Scope 3 activities. It’s a clear signal that long-term decarbonisation will depend on better, and more aligned, information from the places where most of fashion’s emissions sit.

The Fashion Pact’s programme fits directly into that shift. Rather than expanding the reporting landscape, it tries to reduce it to a usable core. The pilot focuses on energy, water, and waste, three areas with high impact and high variability, and structures questions around established methodologies. For brands, that creates a stable baseline for future analysis. For suppliers, it reduces the number of one-off requests and the time spent reformatting identical information for different audiences.

What’s more, Italy’s role gives the pilot additional weight. While fashion’s supply chains stretch far beyond the country, its manufacturing networks remain some of the most established and interconnected in the world. A coordinated change in reporting practice there tends to ripple through the mills, tanneries, and factories that support luxury and premium production globally. If the model works, it has a plausible pathway to expand across other regions and product categories.

Italy might be the right place to start, after all, if the data can’t flow through one of the world’s most mature supply networks, it says a lot about how hard the challenge is everywhere else. It also helps explain why progress toward 2030 has been slower than anticipated. The targets have been clear for years, but the systems required to meet them have not kept pace. Brands can’t meaningfully track emissions pathways without reliable upstream data, and suppliers can’t provide that data consistently without a manageable structure. Without both, climate strategy often becomes an exercise in estimation rather than measurement.

That’s why the move toward shared infrastructure is so important. The industry has spent years announcing targets brand by brand, often supported by individualised reporting frameworks. The accelerator suggests a different trajectory, one where alignment and coordination become the foundation for progress, and where consistency is treated as a necessary enabler rather than an administrative burden.

A standardised questionnaire alone won’t resolve everything. It doesn’t close the investment gap highlighted by the Apparel Impact Institute, which has tracked only $124 million raised toward a $2 billion goal for decarbonisation by 2030. It doesn’t solve the energy-mix challenges facing suppliers across Europe and Asia, and it doesn’t address the broader tension between production growth and the need to reduce emissions overall. But it gives the industry something it has lacked: a shared starting point.

Fashion’s route to decarbonisation depends on the quality of the information that flows through its supply chains. Without that, the sector will continue to make decisions with partial visibility and limited precision. The Fashion Pact’s accelerator is a modest project in scope, but it represents a move toward the kind of coordination that previous efforts have struggled to build. As more suppliers and brands align around a common structure, the clarity improves, and so does the industry’s ability to act on it.