From land to loom: Fashion’s climate problem starts before the factory

In fashion, climate action tends to focus on the visible parts of the value chain, mainly factories. But the deepest environmental and social impacts begin long before production, in land use, agriculture and the communities that depend on these landscapes. 

COP30 shed light on these upstream systems. Regenerative textiles offer one pathway to begin addressing them, but scaling this approach requires understanding history, closing supply gaps and reshaping how we produce our clothes in one of the world's oldest commodity chains. 

Your t-shirt has a 400-year history 

How often do you really think about the history of our clothes? 

That plain white t-shirt feels simple. In weight, it's almost nothing. But the centuries of history that made it possible are anything but simple. 

Long before globalisation became an economic theory, textiles were already globalising the world. 

Cotton is the clearest example. As historian Sven Beckert describes in Empire of Cotton, this single material helped shape the architecture of modern capitalism, tying together plantation economies, colonial rule, forced labour, early industrialisation and the rise of international finance through trading routes and supply chains whose patterns still influence the industry today. 

This historic underpinning reveals an uncomfortable truth: it has never been about just making clothes. 

Fashion and apparel are a socio-ecological system shaped by who holds power, who carries the risk, and whose ecosystems bear the consequences. Many of the countries producing natural materials today, cotton, wool, or hides for leather, are regions more prone to floods and droughts. Meanwhile, the pressure to produce quickly and cheaply comes from entirely different geographies. 

Cotton begins on a farm. The seeds are sown, and everything that follows depends on the soil health, water availability, local conditions,  techniques, and labour. This first step is commonly referred to as Tier 4 - the raw-material production stage. 

Then it moves through ginning, spinning, weaving, finishing, cutting and stitching. It crosses borders multiple times. Each stage carries its own footprint. Behind every step sits a person, a culture, a livelihood, an ecosystem, and a set of risks. 

The industry calls Tier 4 the “last tier”. But it’s where the entire system actually begins.

Where fashion's real footprint hides

The fashion industry accounts for about 1.8% global GHG emissions, according to recent analysis from the Apparel Impact Institute. Roughly one-fifth comes from the raw material stage, even before land use change is considered. 

While synthetic materials dominate the emissions profile, natural materials place disproportionate pressure on land, biodiversity and water because they originate in agriculture.

Land-based systems generate substantially more climate impact than most people realise. Yet fashion sustainability conversations still orbit around factory floors, manufacturing efficiencies and renewable electricity. Many brands already have strategies to address these, as they are often the easiest to act on and involve the actors brands work with every day.

The real work lies upstream. 

The landscapes where cotton is grown. The rangelands where sheep graze. The forests and pastures where cattle are raised. These are the places where environmental stress dominates – and where climate impacts accumulate.

Soil degradation from overgrazing, monocropping, and excessive fertiliser use. Growing water scarcity. Habitat loss. Emissions from fertiliser use, land use change, and soils that lose carbon instead of storing it.

This is also where farmers earn their living and now stand at the front line of extreme climatic events, struggling to adapt fast enough to survive.

Regenerative textiles: Not a trend, but a structural response

Regenerative textiles are not a new material category or a marketing trend. They’re emerging as a response to structural problems embedded in the textile system.

The approach gives farmers agency to draw on their own practices and traditions while working in harmony with nature. COP30 brought Indigenous leadership to the centre of climate negotiations, and while the textile sector was not formally in the room, these are precisely the exact stakeholders that regenerative agriculture intends to empower. 

Regenerative agriculture reduces reliance on fertilisers, uses no or reduced tillage, supports diversified cropping, agroforestry, and adaptive grazing. While there’s much to figure out, including a standardised definition, at its core, it is about what’s changing and how. 

It’s a systems approach grounded in tangible outcomes: healthier soils, stronger biodiversity, improved water cycles, higher livelihoods, and different relationships between brands and farmers. 

The supply gap: Why the materials don’t exist yet

If regeneration is a silver bullet, why isn’t it already the norm? The supply gap.

At Milkywire, we’ve seen corporate interest in regenerative materials grow substantially. But credible supply remains small and fragmented. Several brands have announced intentions to use regenerative cotton, wool, and leather. The question is: how will they source it? 

Regeneration requires time, upfront financing, and forward market commitments.

Farmers need support during transition, as the first two to three years often bring reduced yields while soils recover. Brands want regenerative supply, but they rarely know who their farmers are. They’re not set up to share the financial risk that early transition requires.

Some companies are beginning to take action, including Kering Group, H&M Group, Mango, Toteme, and others. Milkywire supports brands at different stages of this journey, from  setting targets to working with suppliers and connecting directly with farmers and projects on the ground. 

But there’s another problem: traceability.

Once the regenerative material is produced, it needs a clear tracking system from the farm to finished product. Without this, brands cannot make credible or verifiable claims.

This requires bringing the middle of the chain into the conversation, which doesn’t always happen.  

Ginners, traders, spinners, mills and tanneries are key parts of the process and are meant to materialise this vision, but they are often not designed to work with small and variable volumes from regenerative farms. Without incentives or support to adapt their systems, they cannot help move regenerative material through the chain, which limits the scope to smaller pilot stage initiatives. 

Filling the supply gap will require time, investment, new relationships and shared responsibility across every stage of the textile system. Until these pieces come together, regenerative agriculture will continue to lag far behind 

What COP30 revealed about the fashion’s upstream blind spot 

COP30 did not mention fashion by name. Yet its themes were inseparable from the fashion system.

Held in Brazil, a country grappling with rising deforestation and extensive grazing landscapes, this COP placed land and indigenous rights at the centre of global climate negotiations.

Climate policy has long treated fashion as a downstream manufacturing issue. This was reflected again in the Fashion Industry Charter’s open letter at COP30, which called for a just energy transition and emphasised the need for renewable energy, coal phaseout and stronger reporting frameworks. 

Important goals, but they sit only on the surface of a much deeper system.

The Charter also noted the need to strengthen adaptation and resilience, a reminder that the people and landscapes who grow materials bear climate impacts long before a garment reaches a factory floor. 

Another major theme at COP30 was finance. How do we mobilise capital for land stewardship, forest protection, and community resilience?

This question sits at the heart of the fashion system, too. How do we finance a shift to regenerative agriculture? How do we reach cost parity for regenerative materials? How do we make sure farmers are compensated fairly and that risk is shared rather than pushed downstream? 

These are open questions with no single answer. But they point clearly to the need for new models of investment and shared responsibility, which is why we are working closely with brands from strategising to implementation.

The path forward

To close this gap, the sector will need to see textiles as part of the global agricultural system and design context-specific solutions grounded in local realities. 

Corporate strategies must integrate regenerative agriculture at Tier 4. Companies need to be more open about their successes and failures so the real challenges become visible. Progress will depend on brands working together in supply sheds and landscapes and engaging the missing middle as core partners.

Regenerative textiles offer a pathway to align fashion with climate, nature and justice goals. COP30 showed that global climate politics are centring on land and community stewardship. 

If fashion follows that shift, regeneration can help reshape the system.

The first step moves beyond setting a 2030 target. It’s asking your supplier: who grows our cotton?

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