Burberry just pushed its net-zero target back a decade. Ralph Lauren dropped its 2040 goal entirely. As fashion’s carbon footprint hits an all-time high, the industry’s long-horizon sustainability pledges are revealing what they always were: very far away.
Here’s the thing about a promise: it always sounds better the further away it is from its due date. Corporations know this. Fashion labels know this especially well — they’ve spent the better part of a decade constructing elaborate sustainability pledges with deadlines set far enough out to generate goodwill without requiring urgency. Now that the near-term checkpoints embedded in those pledges are actually arriving — and the gap between what brands promised and what they’ve delivered is becoming measurable — something predictable is happening: the longer-term goals are moving.
Burberry is the latest luxury label to make this adjustment publicly. The British heritage label announced in its 2025-2026 annual report that it would push its net zero target from 2040 to 2050 — a ten-year retreat wrapped in the language of pragmatism. “We believe our revised targets reflect a pragmatic response to external factors, while allowing us to maintain a level of ambition in line with our assessment of climate change as a principal risk facing our business,” the company wrote. The stated rationale: a “more detailed understanding” of its supply chain and the plans of industry rivals. What those rivals share: they all set 2050 targets to begin with. Burberry, in abandoning its more ambitious 2040 goal, is not falling behind the industry. It is joining it. This is the same brand that, in 2020, became the first label to achieve the highest score on the Dow Jones Sustainability Index and, in 2022, became the first luxury house to receive SBTi approval for a net-zero target — the very target it has now pushed back a decade.
The ‘2040 Club’ is getting smaller
Burberry isn’t the first luxury brand to have stepped back, and it likely won’t be the last. Ralph Lauren dropped its own 2040 net-zero target entirely in early 2026, replacing it with rolling five-year emissions-reduction milestones — a structure so flexible it commits only to direction without committing to a destination — kind of like boarding an airplane in New York to get to Los Angeles, but the airline will only commit to taking you “somewhere west.” For Ralph Lauren, the decision was framed as a philosophical shift rather than a wholesale retreat: long-horizon pledges, the company argued, don’t drive sufficient accountability. What went less remarked upon: it had already exceeded its 2030 science-based emissions target, achieving 34 percent reductions over 2020 levels, ahead of its 30 percent goal. The company stepped away from the 2040 pledge not because it was failing but because the goal was, apparently, no longer useful.
Chanel and ASOS, which followed Burberry in setting 2040 net zero targets in prior years, have not yet publicly retreated. Kering — whose portfolio includes Gucci and Balenciaga — and LVMH were always holding 2050 targets, positions that once looked like industry laggards but now look more like the consensus position. The floor has risen to meet the ceiling.
Fashion’s carbon math
The practical reality of the fashion industry’s climate position is not a matter of interpretation; the industry’s carbon footprint has reached an all-time high of 944 million tonnes of CO2e, and if the industry continues on its current trajectory, that number is projected to climb above 1.24 billion tonnes by 2030. To stay within a 1.5°C warming pathway, brands would need to cut emissions by at least 45 percent by the end of the decade — a target the industry is not even close to meeting. Of the major brands, only Levi’s, Kering, Ralph Lauren, and Gap are currently on a trajectory to hit their 2030 commitments. “I would not say any brand has a credible pathway right now to meet their targets for 2030,” Business of Fashion reporter Sarah Kent said last November ahead of COP30.
The reason lies in the structure of how fashion emissions are distributed. Scope 3 — the carbon generated not by a brand’s own operations but by its supply chain, raw materials sourcing, logistics, and the entire industrial apparatus behind the garment on the rack — is where the industry’s footprint actually sits. A luxury label can LEED-certify its flagship stores, power its headquarters on renewable energy, and outfit its logistics fleet with EVs and still have nearly all of its real climate impact buried in dye houses, tanneries, and spinning mills scattered across countries where energy grids run heavily on coal. The math doesn’t close without supply chain transformation at scale, and that transformation requires both investment and long-term supplier relationships that most brands have been unwilling to fund.
The Science Based Targets initiative — the nonprofit that validates corporate commitments against Paris Agreement benchmarks — removed more than 239 companies from its registry in 2024 for failing to submit validated targets on schedule. Scope 3 complexity, evolving standards, and the difficulty of controlling emissions outside a brand’s direct operations were the most commonly cited reasons. About 60 percent of the affected companies retained near-term targets, but the delistings were a signal: the pipeline of corporate climate announcements was running ahead of the pipeline of credible corporate climate plans. The formal target revisions from Burberry and Ralph Lauren are the public end of a much longer trend. The more common pattern is “greenhushing“: companies going quiet on sustainability communications, letting pledges sit unaddressed in annual report footnotes, and simply waiting for the conversation to move on. Many do.
The political environment has created significant room for this maneuver. The Trump administration’s withdrawal from U.S. climate frameworks gave American brands — and brands selling into American markets — considerable cover to deprioritize long-term climate commitments without regulatory consequence. The UN’s flagship Fashion Industry Charter for Climate Action, which once counted close to 150 member companies, has seen its membership collapse to fewer than 70, with some companies removed for failing to meet the charter’s most basic reporting requirements; 63 percent of brands are behind on the decarbonization goals they set for 2030.
The regulatory picture in Europe is moving sharply in the opposite direction — even if just in theory. The EU’s Green Claims Directive, which is currently stalled, would require brands to back sustainability claims with third-party verification or face enforcement. An Italian court already issued a €1 million fine against the Dublin-based operator of Shein’s European website for vague and misleading sustainability messaging. For luxury brands, the result is a bifurcated regulatory environment that rewards strategic silence more than it rewards ambitious public commitments. In the U.S., there is little cost to saying less. In Europe, there is, increasingly, a cost to saying more than you can prove. The rational response to that gap is not transparency. It is quiet.
What does progress look like?
The outliers are worth noting because they eliminate the most convenient excuse. LVMH reported exceeding its 2026 Scope 1 and 2 climate target ahead of schedule, cutting those emissions by more than 50 percent. Kering has maintained its targets and remains among the few major luxury groups on track for 2030. Levi’s has been consistently identified as one of the few large-scale fashion brands with a genuine decarbonization pathway. These companies are navigating the same Scope 3 complexity, the same geopolitically disrupted supply chains, and the same macroeconomic pressure as everyone else. The conditions are not the differentiator; the choices around them are.
The sector has structured its commitments in the same way it structures most everything else: with maximum visibility on the launch and maximum flexibility on delivery. Targets set for 2040, in 2020, were always going to be evaluated by executives who didn’t set them, in a business climate no one could predict, using supply chain systems that did not yet exist. The long horizon was the point. And now that the distance is closing, the horizon is, predictably, moving. The sector has structured its commitments in the same way it structures most everything else: with maximum visibility on the launch and maximum flexibility on delivery. Targets set for 2040, in 2020, were always going to be evaluated by executives who didn’t set them, in a business climate no one could predict, using supply chain systems that did not yet exist. The long horizon was the point. And now that the distance is closing, the horizon is, predictably, moving. Fashion, of course, is not alone in this. The same pattern has played out across industries: Stellantis declared the EU’s 2035 zero-emission vehicle mandate “unrealistic” at the 2025 Munich Motor Show and dropped its all-EV target for 2030; Delta reframed its net zero commitment as an “aspiration”; major banks staged a quiet exodus from climate alliances. The targets that generated goodwill at peak ESG momentum in 2020 are the same ones being walked back now, especially as the political and economic environment has shifted.
Burberry called it a pragmatic response. Ralph Lauren called it accountability. The more structural explanation may be the one Kent offered Business of Fashion: “The fundamental conflict at the heart of the fashion industry’s climate commitments is that you’ve got a business built on extracting stuff and producing stuff and selling stuff. The more stuff they sell, the better the business does, but the worse the environmental impact is,” she said. “Profitability and sales growth are fundamentally at odds with the environmental commitments companies have made.” And, it seems, they will continue to be for the foreseeable future.
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