Suppliers are central to apparel decarbonization, yet too often they face the cost, complexity, and risk of implementation without the support needed to move at scale.
Our 2025 Annual Impact Report shows how Aii is helping remove the financial, technical, and alignment barriers that slow supplier-led emissions reductions, while outlining what it will take to move faster in real operating conditions.
SAN FRANCISCO, May 7, 2026 一 Today, Apparel Impact Institute (Aii) published its 2025 Impact Report, sharing its progress in decarbonization across the apparel supply chain and announcing a strategic shift to higher impact projects to accelerate fashion sector emission reductions.
With the majority of the apparel industry’s greenhouse gases generated during manufacturing, suppliers play an essential role in sustainable apparel. However, suppliers are often left to navigate the cost, effort, and risk of decarbonization on their own. Since 2018, Aii has partnered with over 1,500 supplier facilities in key manufacturing regions to drive decarbonization, reducing over 1.1 million tonnes of CO2e and unlocking nearly $188 million in total capital.
While Aii’s initiatives have strengthened the systems required to drive measurable decarbonization and delivered tangible, incremental progress, the scale of emissions reductions required by 2030 demands a higher impact approach. To enable this, Aii will invest more heavily in capital-intensive, technologically advanced solutions that are capable of delivering the most significant carbon reductions.
Over the next five years, Aii will annually partner with at least 20 facilities to implement higher-impact climate solutions. This partnership will connect them to fit-for-purpose financing, demonstrating a replicable business case for decarbonizing apparel production in the sector’s most carbon-intensive regions. As these projects mature, their impact will increase significantly, meaningfully accelerating emissions savings.
“Our work to date has laid the groundwork for these higher impact projects, developing the collaborative ecosystem of brands, suppliers, and financial institutions needed to enable apparel decarbonization,” said Lewis Perkins, President and CEO of Aii. “We’ve proven that emissions can be reduced inside supplier facilities under real commercial conditions. The next phase is about scaling that work: taking on more capital-intensive, technically complex projects and building the financial pathways to deploy them across the industry.”
“These projects are key to enabling large-scale decarbonization, but require substantially larger investments,” said Kristina Elinder Liljas, Senior Director of Sustainable Finance at Aii. “Backing blended finance tools that exist within Aii’s Fashion Climate Fund, and pooling private sector and philanthropic funding are crucial in making these projects investable for suppliers, brands, and financial institutions – the work simply cannot happen without collective financing.”
The report also emphasizes the importance of supplier engagement in realizing decarbonization goals. It outlines efforts made to support suppliers’ net-zero journeys, including the development of Aii’s Energy and Carbon Benchmark, a first-of-its-kind tool offering transparent, independent environmental production data across textile suppliers, and the establishment of the Aii Supplier Council, which will elevate supplier perspectives in programming, financing, and cross-sector collaboration.
The full 2025 Impact Report is available for download at [LINK].
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Apparel Impact Institute (Aii) is a nonprofit collective founded in 2017 by four industry leaders: the Sustainable Apparel Coalition (SAC), the Sustainable Trade Initiative (IDH), Natural Resource Defense Council (NRDC) and Target Corporation. The organization emerged organically as a result of a real need that apparel brands and retailers self-identified. Gap Inc., PVH, Arvind Mills, HSBC, GIZ, Stichting Doen and Schmidt Family Foundation joined the founders in the first three years of start-up and organizational development. Aii identifies, funds, and scales proven quality solutions to accelerate positive impact in the apparel and footwear industry. Aii programs focus on areas that result in positive environmental impact from the production of apparel and footwear products to improve the industry.
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