2025 has been punctuated by extreme weather events that have caused climate chaos around the world. It is set to be in the top three hottest years since records began, with more frequent, unpredictable, and intense climate disasters occurring, from wildfires and heat waves in Europe to cyclones and flooding across South-East Asia.
Fashion’s biggest production regions have been hit hard this year, with extreme weather continuing to have a pronounced impact on the people making clothing—an estimated 300 million workers globally along the entire value chain. Despite ongoing warnings of the social and economic toll that the climate crisis is already having, the fashion industry continues to ignore the warning signs, and is yet to make any significant strides towards protecting and supporting its vital workforce.
A report released in December by Climate Rights International (CRI) has identified nine major fashion brands connected to factories in Pakistan where workers are under immense heat stress, underscoring the concerning disconnect between brands’ public commitments to workers rights, and their harmful sourcing practices that continue to fail workers. Experts say that solutions across the full supply chain from farms to factories must be informed by the lived experience of those on the ground, with brands playing a key role in driving improvements.
New research shows where brands are failing workers
The CRI’s new report,“They Don’t See What Heat Does to Our Bodies”: Climate Change, Labor Rights, and the Cost of Fashion in Karachi, Pakistan, details the impact on workers in garment factories who are routinely exposed to dangerous temperatures as high as 52°C (126°F). It calls out H&M, Inditex, GAP, MANGO, ASOS, C&A, NA-KD, NEXT, and IKEA for their complicity and responsibility to influence the working conditions in heat-stressed sourcing regions. “Brands have to use their leverage on all the suppliers, not only in Pakistan, but elsewhere like Sri Lanka and India,” says Zehra Khan, a trade unionist and the secretary general of the Home Based Women Workers Federation Pakistan. “Workers should be the center of all this, because if workers are not there, the business will not be there,” she says. “We have to invest in the workers.”
While Pakistan is one of the most climate-vulnerable nations, it’s not the only fashion producing country facing imminent challenges. In India, the world’s second largest cotton producer, extreme heat and flooding are putting pressure on cotton supply chains, significantly reducing crop yields across the country’s farms, the majority of which are small-scale and women-run. In late 2025, Sri Lanka was in a state of emergency due to Cyclone Ditwah, one of the worst climate disasters the country has ever seen. Fashion production is inherently intertwined with the economic output of these countries, with apparel making up a significant proportion of overall exports—as much as 60% in Pakistan and 44% in Sri Lanka.
At the factory level, a lack of union representation means workers are often unable to collectively demand better conditions in facilities, like increased ventilation, air conditioning, more bathroom breaks and clean drinking water. The consequences on people’s health, wellbeing, and financial security are dire. Without access to these necessities, workers report dehydration, exhaustion, respiratory issues, heat stroke and other heat related illnesses that cause them to miss work. When typical wages are already below living wage standards, the CRI reports that “even losing one day’s pay can destabilize their household budget.” At the raw material level of the supply chain, Indian cotton farmers impacted by recurring droughts are facing an unprecedented mental health crisis, with climate change making agriculture an increasingly volatile livelihood.
Manoranjan Pegu, Country Program Director for the Solidarity Center in Sri Lanka, says floods have caused a rise in distress migration from rural areas into cities, with vulnerable climate migrants often seeking work in garment factories. “When you are distressfully migrating, then obviously you are open to more exploitation, and your workers rights are more violated, and your wages are lower,” he explains.
The shockwaves of these climate disasters haven’t raised alarm bells for brands, overwhelmingly headquartered in the United States, the UK, and Europe, despite appeals from experts and advocacy groups in recent years. The CRI’s new report states that brands’ codes of conducts for their suppliers fall short of covering heat-specific issues, while workplace safety agreements like the Accord fail to include climate-linked temperature risks.
Since 2020, Cornell University’s ILR Global Labor Institute (GLI) has been releasing reports drawing links between the climate crisis and fashion workers. Its Higher Ground? series even identified a combined $65 billion loss in export earnings from four leading fashion production countries between 2025 and 2030 to demonstrate the immense economic consequences in store for fashion producers.
In a November 2025 report titled The Heat Is On: How Heat Stress Impacts The Apparel Industry, Jobs, And Worker Health, the GLI and partners used existing publicly available data on an unnamed global brand’s sourcing volumes from suppliers in Vietnam and Cambodia to estimate the climate linked financial impacts for brands. Extreme heat and flooding could reduce a global brand’s operating profit by up to five percent annually by 2030. Flooding alone could interrupt roughly 56 business days in Vietnam by 2030, translating to a lost value of $9.99 million in the cost of goods sold annually.
Despite this clear threat to the industry’s profit margins, sustainability and supply chain disruptions have dropped off fashion’s risk radar, according to the new 2026 State of Fashion report by Business of Fashion and McKinsey, with the climate crisis or supply chain workers failing to feature in the 143 page report.
From farms to factories, worker-led solutions move the needle
The fashion establishment may be failing to adequately address worker’s needs, but on the ground, solutions are rooted in the need for more robust labor rights and widespread community education. Cotton Connect, an organization that supports farmers in cotton production hubs to be more climate resilient, trained over 450,000 farmers between 2023 and 2024. Their work includes sharing practical solutions for better soil health and water stewardship by reducing chemical use and increasing biological inputs.
Cotton Connect’s Women’s Climate Change Ambassador Program specifically focuses on making women experts in climate change mitigation techniques. “These people are training and helping their communities to be more resilient towards the impact of climate change,” explains Prakash Philip, Global Director of Strategy and Impact at Cotton Connect. “We engage with women’s groups and local communities to help them understand income diversification, and to look at Net Zero village programs, clean energy solutions, and alternative livelihoods.”
In factories, workers experiencing heat stress require fundamental protections, according to the CRI report. “We are not asking for luxury, just basic rights. If the heat keeps rising every year, workers like us will suffer the most,” an anonymous worker told the CRI. “We need fans, ventilation, fair wages, job security, and proper medical support. These are basic needs, not demands for comfort.”
Unions play a vital role in ensuring these needs are met by establishing grievance mechanisms if and when an employer fails to provide adequate provisions for heat stress. “The dialog between the trade union and the employer is very important,” says Khan. “So we can understand the employer and the employer can understand the trade union, and then we can resolve the issue, or take up the issue together with the government.” Brands should enable freedom of association and not actively block unionization in factories if they’re serious about tackling heat stress.
Experts agree that brands should go beyond government level intervention, as human rights and labor laws vary from country to country, with unreliable implementation. “Brands have to come in and actually engage with the suppliers to start building [better] situations,” says Pegu. “It’s absolutely important that brands don’t hide behind domestic legislation, because domestic legislation always leaves a lot to be desired.” Brands are encouraged to review their agreements and codes of conduct to include heat stress as part of their audits and assessments, going beyond existing laws to use their influence with suppliers. “I don’t think the brands have done that kind of engagement historically, but they should do more,” says Pegu. “There’s a big responsibility.”
One thing is for sure: the world is getting hotter, and fashion supply chain workers are at the forefront of the crisis. Brands have an outsized role to play in ensuring workers have their basic human rights supported in their workplaces, and a vested interest in their own supply chain and business resilience.
