Sustainable Fashion Communication Playbook launched

28 / 06 / 2023

By Marwa Nassar - - -

The United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) and the UN Climate-Change-convened Fashion Charter today launched the Sustainable Fashion Communication Playbook, a guide for consumer-facing communicators in the global fashion industry to align efforts to sustainability targets, incorporating both environmental and social factors.

The Sustainable Fashion Communication Playbook highlights the importance of shifting fashion communication to enable a sustainable and circular fashion sector, drawing attention to the role of marketers, brand managers, imagemakers, storytellers, media, influencers and beyond, according to a press release by UNEP.

Published jointly by UNEP and UN Climate Change, it shows communicators how to take action through countering misinformation, reducing messages perpetuating overconsumption, redirecting aspiration to more sustainable lifestyles, and empowering consumers to demand greater action from businesses and policymakers. Ultimately it intends to help communicators explore how to assist in decoupling value creation from resource extraction and volume growth, while improving wellbeing.

Unsustainable patterns of consumption and production are contributing directly and significantly to the triple planetary crisis, not to mention social injustices worldwide. The fashion sector is considered responsible, for instance, for between 2 percent and 8 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions as well as significant pollution, water extraction and biodiversity impacts, including 9 per cent of annual microplastic losses to oceans, while consuming 215 trillion liters of water per year.

While addressing production impacts is essential, shifting patterns of excess consumption in core markets is also a priority, which means confronting the dominant linear economic model and its accompanying narrative of newness, immediacy and disposability.

The Sustainable Fashion Communication Playbook acknowledges the power of fashion’s marketing engine, and the significant role it plays in shaping desire, aspiration and levels of consumption. It presents the need to direct such efforts towards sustainable and circular solutions as a creative opportunity. It provides a much needed framework when policies around how to communicate environmental claims increasingly come into force.

By leveraging their skills, communicators can be a part of the solution rather than contributors to the problem, and, in doing so, help advance towards the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the Paris Agreement on climate change.

“The balance between the science of sustainability and reimagining the fashion narrative is where communicators can excel. There is so much power in the stories fashion tells. If the fashion sector is to meet its sustainability targets, we need its enormous marketing engine to redirect its efforts towards sustainable consumption. But there is a notable void for participation in this change from communication stakeholders. The Sustainable Fashion Communication Playbook provides the practical guide that is needed. Importantly, it highlights how there is scope for huge creativity to envision and realise the world we want to live in,” said Daniel Cooney, Director of Communication, UNEP.