Lululemon and H&M Group support £200m Fashion Climate Fund

Lululemon, the H&M Group and the H&M Foundation are among the lead investors of a £200 million fund that aims to accelerate solutions to decarbonise the fashion industry. 

The Fashion Climate Fund was created by the Apparel Impact Institute (Aii) to identify, invest in, scale, and measure verified impact solutions to decarbonise and modernise fashion industry supply chains.

Together Aii and its lead partners, including the Schmidt Family Foundation, which was created by the Executive Chairman of Google, aim to halve carbon emissions in the industry by 2030, by leveraging a collaborative funding model that connects philanthropy and corporate entities.

The Aii would see philanthropic funds invested in pre-seed and pilot innovations to accelerate solutions and provide capital to support proven solutions to scale impact. It estimates that this new collaborative approach would unlock £1.6 billion in blended capital over the next eight years.

While many businesses have pledged support to the Science Based Target Initiatives, research conducted by the Aii and World Resources Institute has suggested that 96% of the fashion industry’s emissions come from third-party farms and factories that are shared across the industry.

To tackle this, the Fashion Climate Fund will also provide programmatic funding for supplier interventions across the value chain: transitioning to renewable electricity, accelerating next-generation materials, scaling sustainable materials and practices, eliminating coal in manufacturing, and improving energy efficiency.

Aii added that it has joined forces with Textile Exchange, Fashion For Good, Solidaridad, and others to focus on these areas.

Christiane Dolva, Strategy Lead Planet Positive, H&M Foundation said: “The urgency to address the climate issues has never been more acute. Early-stage innovations and new solutions play a critical role, but the impact does not happen before they can be scaled, and the industry starts adopting and implementing them. The Fashion Climate Fund will support new programs and solutions with a structured pipeline for getting from pilot to scale. We believe it provides a powerful mechanism to overcome the challenges of getting new solutions implemented by the industry, and thereby accelerate the progress on climate action.”

Lewis Perkins, President of Aii, added: “By aligning industry leaders and climate-focused philanthropists behind scalable solutions, the Fashion Climate Fund opens a pathway for greater collaboration and cross-pollination of solutions, facilitating greater investment and stronger collective action toward the industry goal of halving emissions by 2030, while also seeking climate justice for the citizens and communities where our fashion is made."