With world leaders focusing on forests and land-use at the COP26 conference, the fashion and textile industry are major contributors to the depletion of natural resources.

Amna Mujahid, Thematic Analyst at GlobalData, a leading data and analytics company, offers her view:

“Unsustainable growth in the fashion industry is responsible for a large share of environmental damage.

“Only a combination of the fashion industry keeping in check their depletion of natural resources and consumers employing market forces to lower demand for fast fashion will curtail the harm to the environment.

“Cotton, for example, accounts for 33% of all fibres found in textiles, but the crop requires approximately 2,700 litres of water to make a single cotton shirt. This has placed a significant strain on water supplies, particularly the Aral Sea in Central Asia, which has almost completely disappeared as cotton farmers have drawn water from the two rivers it feeds into, the Amu Darya and Syr Darya rivers. The environmental impacts of bio cotton are much less than conventional cotton, as it uses less water and pollutes less. The fashion industry should continue to test these better options.”

Information based on GlobalData’s report: ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) in Retail and Apparel – Thematic Research