Natural attraction

26/11/2025

Leather industry representatives are working increasingly closely with their counterparts in sectors such as wool, silk, cotton and cashmere. A united voice from suppliers of different natural fibres stands a better chance of being heard at important events like the United Nations COP conferences on climate change.

The 2025 United Nations Climate Change Conference, COP30, is upon us. It starts on November 10 and runs until November 21, with the Brazilian city of Belém as the venue. COP stands for Conference of the Parties. The ‘parties’ are the 198 states and organisations that have signed up to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). The Belém gathering will be the thirtieth time they have met to discuss policies and ideas that can mitigate the effects of climate change.

The leather industry has consistently sought to be part of this effort. When COP26 took place in Glasgow in 2021, the industry published the first ‘Leather Manifesto’. This document celebrates the circular-economy credentials of leather, especially its durability, repairability and lasting beauty, which foments long use of the finished products that are made from leather. Good examples of this include handbags that frequently pass from one generation to the next.

Leather-sector organisations from all parts of the world put their names to the original manifesto and did so again when the industry relaunched it for COP29, which took place in Baku, Azerbaijan, in 2024. Now, a total of 20 organisations have signed a newly updated version for Belém.

In the 2025 version, signatories have explained: “As we see every year with the COP negotiations, resolving differences of opinion on how best to protect the planet and people is a huge challenge. A significant factor is the often opposing views of the negotiating parties and their presentation of evidence to support their views. Sustainability debates are skewed by narratives and numbers that obscure reality.”

The text adds that “this obfuscation” has also blighted perceptions of leather. “Leather, durable, repairable, and deeply woven into our cultural identity, is one of humanity’s oldest materials,” it continues. “For millennia it has clothed, sheltered, and protected us.” But in today’s sustainability discourse, the text says, leather is largely misunderstood, sometimes vilified, often mis-measured, and rarely recognised for what it truly is: a renewable, circular by- product of livestock farming. Relaunching the document just before the start of the Belém gathering is an attempt to correct this imbalance and to position leather as a positive, renewable biomaterial within a circular economy.

More impact

The intention for 2025 was to do even more at COP30 in Brazil. With the host nation being one of the biggest leather- producing countries in the world, there was hope among the main proponents of the manifesto that Belém would provide a platform for making the case for leather in an even more impactful way.

After attending the 2024 event in Baku, the secretary of the International Council of Tanners (ICT), Dr Kerry Senior, said the leather industry should work hard to make its presence felt at this year’s gathering in Brazil. “We need to be there to make the case for natural, long-lasting, climate- positive materials,” he said.

A veteran of several COPs now, Dr Senior has long argued that the big opportunity these events offer is unparalleled access to policy-makers and to journalists who, day in, day out, cover climate change. He has described these encounters as a chance to reach “really relevant people with the truth about leather and to answer their questions face to face”. He has campaigned for partner organisations across the global leather industry to help fund a united presence at COP to make sure plenty of knowledgeable industry experts are on hand to answer as many of those questions as possible.

Slow progress

This vision will not become reality at COP30. Kerry Senior applied for official representative status for ICT at the event well over a year in advance. It took until summer 2025 for the UNFCCC secretariat to reply. By that time, organisers of the Belém event were under considerable pressure to have everything ready on time.

Even by mid-October, with only a few weeks to go before the start, there was still plenty of work to do on accommodation (including at the ‘Leaders’ Village’, where visiting heads of state will stay, plus so-called ‘floating hotels’ to make up for a lack of rooms for ordinary delegates in the city and the surrounding area), transportation (including at Belém airport), and other projects.

The United Nations liked the idea of holding a COP event

in Belém because the city’s nickname is ‘The Gateway to the Amazon’. This busy port is actually on the Pará River, but the Pará is part of the greater Amazon River system. The federal Brazilian government, the government of the state of Pará and the city authorities have consistently assured the world that they will have everything in place when COP30 kicks off.

Next time

These pressures were enough for the secretariat to say in the summer that it was unable to process any outstanding applications for official representative status. “We can tick all the boxes,” Dr Senior insists, “but the secretariat has had to move slowly for Belém and we are not going to be there. Instead, we will focus on having everything ready for next time.”

There is still discussion about where the next COP will be after Belém, but the latest indications are that Turkey and Australia are both in the running and could even share the honour of hosting the event. Fittingly, then, if the hosting is shared, what ICT wants is to be part of a shared delegation with other industry bodies that promote natural fibres. This will mean representing leather, wool, cotton, silk, cashmere and others together.

Big enough

“We will have something really impressive to talk about,” the ICT secretary says, “but we will have to go as ‘natural materials’ to be big enough to attract delegates’ attention. We will have ministers, civil servants and non-government organisations all in that space together. They will be there to talk about emissions and climate change. We will be able to arrange meetings with them. National associations will be able to talk to their countries’ ministers. We will be able to do all of this at scale.”

He adds that, at COP, people go into conversations with one conviction at the forefront of their minds: that global action is necessary. “The discussions are all with a view to formulating policy,” he concludes. “That’s why this is a unique opportunity. Even if it won’t happen for us this year, we know it is an opportunity that will come back.”

Rome encounters

A collective approach involving other natural materials seems to have become a consistent theme in the autumn of 2025. Dr Senior was part of a leather industry delegation that attended a series of events that the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), also part of the United Nations, organised in Rome at the end of September and start of October.

The FAO’s theme was sustainable livestock transformation. There were high-level encounters with the FAO leadership team, as well as with some of the other organisations that face the challenge of convincing brands that natural materials are best. Secretary-general of European leather industry representative body COTANCE, Gustavo González-Quijano, spoke at the Rome event. He talked to the audience about traceability in the leather supply chain and about leather’s links to sustainable livestock management.

Where all roads lead

As if to give an early signal of the joint efforts that lie ahead at future United Nations events, Dr Paul Swan of the International Wool Textile Organisation (IWTO) also spoke in Rome. The IWTO is the global authority for standards in the wool industry. He presented wool as having “a long wear-life” and as one of the materials most likely to be reused and recycled. But he pointed out that wool is also rated poorly in “high-profile environmental ratings platforms for textiles”. He puts this down to weaknesses in the carbon accounting assumptions of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), yet another United Nations body.

These assumptions, Dr Swan argues, do not accurately reflect “biological reality”. They fail to distinguish between fossil carbon and biogenic carbon. Our consumption of fossil fuels puts into the atmosphere carbon that had been stored for millions of years. With biogenic carbon, living organisms, including sheep, absorb carbon from the plants they eat and return a high proportion of it to nature for it to be reabsorbed. He contends that this makes an enormous difference to carbon emissions calculations for wool and the IWTO is currently carrying out field studies in New Zealand, South Africa, the UK and Australia to prove its point.

If you see parallels here with cattle and leather, Dr Swan does too. “The same rules, the same accounting issues affect leather,” he says. “They affect any product that is based on a photosynthetic system.”

IWTO secretary general, Dalena White, points out that clothing and textile production doubled in the first 15 years of this century, but that 60% of the fibres brands choose and manufacturers use now are fossil-fuel based. Ms White is also co-spokesperson for Make The Label Count, a coalition of more than 70 organisations representing natural fibre industries globally. IWTO and the International Council of Tanners are both members of this coalition.

Make The Label Count is campaigning for fair, science- based legislation that recognises the environmental benefits of natural fibres in the circular economy. “Natural fibre production involves capturing carbon from the atmosphere through photosynthesis,” Dalena White explains. “This is a critical environmental function and current methodologies fail to recognise it.” Limitations in current LCA methodologies inadvertently steer brands away from natural fibres towards fossil fuel-based alternatives, Make The Label Count contends.

This brings us back to COP. It is the IPCC that provides the scientific basis for many of the climate-change policy discussions that take place at the COP meetings. What the IPCC says is the accepted wisdom, but also a contributing factor to the “obfuscation” that the newest version of the Leather Manifesto alludes to. What happened in Rome this autumn of 2025 must have given COTANCE, the IWTO, the ICT and others a foretaste of how they can change this if they unite and speak with one voice at future COP events. All roads used to lead to Rome. Now, perhaps, they lead to COP.

Sheep in Victoria, Australia. If limitations in current LCA methodologies inadvertently steer brands away from natural fibres towards fossil fuel-based alternatives, organisations representing natural fibres must work together to drive change.

Credit: The Woolmark Company