The leather sector issued a carefully worded manifesto in advance of COP28 but was under-represented at the event itself, leaving anti-leather campaigner Stella McCartney to present herself as the sole voice of the fashion industry.

The global leather industry may come to view the 2023 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP28) as something of a missed opportunity. However, if the industry can prepare better for future events and take the lessons of 2023 on board, it has a good chance to turn COP into a positive platform. This is the view of the secretary of the International Council of Tanners (ICT), Dr Kerry Senior.

Ahead of the most recent event, which took place in Dubai from the end of November until mid-December, industry organisations from around the world admirably joined forces to issue a new leather industry manifesto. An appropriate number of leather industry bodies, 28 in total, signed the COP28 manifesto, calling for greater use of natural materials, in particular leather, in addressing the challenges of man-made climate change.

Good timing

The timing of this call was good. In spite of having oil-rich United Arab Emirates as the host country, there was feverish talk in the build-up to COP28 and during conference sessions that an agreement to phase out fossil fuels was in the offing. December 5 was set aside as ‘Energy Day’ at the conference and prominent climate activist Sophia Kianni chose that moment to launch a campaign she called ‘We Wear Oil’. This involved covering herself in an oil-like substance (she says it wasn’t really oil, but a mixture of food-grade elements and dye) for a photo shoot for Vogue Arabia.

She explained that cheap, fossil fuel-based fibres like polyester allow the fashion industry to overproduce. She said there was a direct correlation between the growth of synthetic fibres and fast fashion. “One would not exist without the other,” she added. “One of the biggest problems today is that we consume so much and so fast, and fast fashion is killing our planet. The fast fashion industry has become part of the fossil fuel industry. We are all literally wearing oil.” In the end, COP28 closed with an agreement that the United Nations says “signals the beginning of the end of the fossil fuel era”. It said negotiators from 200 countries and institutions had laid the ground for “a swift, just and equitable transition”.

Ms Kianni commented: “We can make young people understand that they are part of the solution by giving them the tools they need to understand what difference they can make. Every time we choose to rewear an outfit, every moment we decide to buy mindfully, we are casting a vote for the world we want to live in.” She went on to say that choosing quality over quantity and opting for second-hand over new are more than just fashion choices. “They are declarations of our commitment to the planet,” she concluded.

Negative climate impact

The preferences she advocates are ones that leather can support wholeheartedly, as the industry’s COP28 manifesto made clear. Products made from leather, wool, silk and other natural fibres can remain in use for long periods of time, it pointed out, and can be easily passed on to new owners. Products made from these materials are eminently repairable and can be repurposed or readily composted at end of life. The manifesto quoted recent work by Australian researcher Dr Stephen Wiedemann and others that found the climate change impacts of natural fibres can be negative if owners increase the number of wears or uses of a finished product by 50%. The manifesto document explained that this means products made from leather and other natural fibres can claim to have a negative climate-change impact in the course of their time in use. This is primarily because ongoing use of a long-lasting product made from natural materials means avoiding the emissions associated with the manufacture of a new product made from petrochemical synthetic materials.
“Leather offers an opportunity to make the best use of the resources available and to do so without diminishing them or causing harm to the environment,” the text said. “There are currently huge volumes of readily available hides and skins going unused which could be transformed into sustainable leather, replacing fossil fuel-derived synthetic alternatives, with the additional emissions and impacts those entail.” The 28 signatories have calculated that hides and skins that currently fail to come into the leather value could put shoes on more than 2.5 billion pairs of feet.

A unique opportunity

The COP28 conference itself represented a good opportunity to present these arguments in discussion with the influential figures, policy-makers and mainstream journalists who travelled to Dubai to take part. ICT secretary, Dr Senior, was in attendance but he believes the leather industry should have had more in-person representation at the event. COP conferences offer, he says, “an entirely unique opportunity” for representatives of the leather industry to contribute to and influence the thinking that will go into policies for addressing climate change. “The whole world is here,” he said at the time, “including world leaders and senior government representatives, discussing the issue in a manner that can’t be achieved anywhere else.”

As the Sophia Kianni campaign shows, the wider fashion industry is a sector that comes to many people’s minds when they think about efforts to combat climate change. On the ground, the person who claimed to be speaking for fashion at COP28 was designer Stella McCartney. She specifically told Reuters that she had travelled to Dubai “to represent the world of fashion”. As everyone knows, one of the ways in which Ms McCartney frequently presents her vision for the future of fashion is to call for designers and brands to cut their ties to leather. In keeping with this, she used COP28 to present Mirum, a material that biotech start-up Natural Fiber Welding has developed using natural raw materials. She referred to Mirum as a reason to be optimistic about there being “a positive end to the story” for fashion. An important attribute of Mirum, in her opinion, is that it is “leather-free”.

For Kerry Senior, it was clear that Ms McCartney used COP28 as a platform to attack leather, and that she had the ear of plenty of policy-makers. More leather industry representatives at COP28 would have made it easier to present an alternative to this narrative and to link leather to positive developments such as the widespread desire to move away from fossil fuels. He wants the leather sector to learn from this and be better represented at future COP events. COP29 will take place in Azerbaijan from November 11-22 this year, while COP30 will take place in November 2025 with one of the biggest leather-producing countries in the world, Brazil, as the host. “We need to be there,” Dr Senior says, “to make the case for natural, long-lasting, climate-positive materials. We need to think about how that might happen.”

Face to face

He points out that, of a total of 100,000 visitors to the Dubai conference, 4,000 were journalists covering the climate story. “The scope to reach a diverse, global audience is huge, if properly coordinated,” he argues. The Blue Zone at the event is where many informal meetings take place and provides space for organisations to set up stands and displays and even host presentations and discussions. According to Dr Senior, policy-makers appeared to enjoy meeting individuals and groups in the Blue Zone at Dubai, perhaps because high levels of security and exclusivity at the event mean they can be relatively relaxed. 

His view is that, for an affordable investment, the leather industry could have a designated Blue Zone space at future events, with COP30 in Brazil a particularly attractive prospect. “This should be achievable with a combined industry effort,” he says. “If we aren’t there, the danger is that the only views on leather will, once again, come from the lone voice for fashion, Stella McCartney. We have an opportunity to reach really relevant people with the truth about leather and to answer their questions face to face. It would take a lot of work and, well before the start of the COP event, the national associations, tanners and other bodies would have to send invitations to their government representatives to visit the stand. But it would be worth the effort because this is a unique concentration of people with one issue in mind.”

The closing plenary session at COP28 in Dubai in December. 
Credit: UN Climate Change/Kiara Worth

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