Paving the ground for nature-positive transformative change in the Fashion Industry: an exploration of textile, apparel, and fashion’s (TAF) direct and indirect drivers of biodiversity loss

The intensity of the current global biodiversity loss crisis and the failure of the existing governance and policies highlight the need for transformative change. It has been argued that those failures are due to unfit-for-purpose problem definitions, i.e., a mismatch between the identified and the actual problems. Therefore, to achieve a societal system-wide reorganisation, transformative processes should start from biodiversity prioritisation, i.e., positioning biodiversity concerns as first order problems beyond economic utility and compromise rationales. Moreover, there is an agreement that transformative biodiversity governance should address the indirect drivers of biodiversity loss, including impactful economic sectors and relevant businesses. In this exploratory qualitative study, we build upon expert interviews and grey literature to identify, describe, and discuss the main direct and indirect drivers of biodiversity loss connected to the textile, apparel, and fashion (TAF) industry. Despite the sector’s high environmental impact, the topic of biodiversity loss has been completely neglected in the academic study of sustainable fashion and the main sectorial EU policies. Moreover, we conduct a frame analysis to understand how the problem of ‘fashion and biodiversity’ is being defined and its implications for transformative change. Our results show that the impact of the TAF sector on biodiversity loss seems to be concentrated in the raw material primary production, through land-use change and the overexploitation of natural resources. Economic (i.e., overproduction and overconsumption, the ‘fast fashion’ model, globally fragmented supply chains), governance (e.g., labour and environmental regulations), and human capital (e.g., education, biodiversity indicators and measurements) factors seem to be the most influential indirect drivers. Regarding problem definitions, the fashion industry describes biodiversity loss as an issue of ‘impacts and dependencies’ in which private actors should play the main role in transforming the sector towards a future in which economic growth and biodiversity conservation can both be achieved. Opposite to this, the ‘slow fashion’ frame describes the problem by referring to economic and governance indirect drivers of biodiversity loss. However, this frame is quite fragmented when speaking about future visions and interventions. As an implication, the potential mainstreaming of the more coherent and unified ‘impacts and dependencies’ frame could compromise pro-biodiversity transformative change by prioritising economic growth to conservation. The results of our study prepare the field for further research about the potential transformations of the TAF sector and can inform relevant sectorial stakeholders and civil society organisations to better design their biodiversity policies and advocacy campaigns.