Apparel & Footwear Working Group

The Apparel & Footwear sector is responsible for 1.025 gigatons of CO2eq every year and could be responsible for up to 8% of the global CO2eq emissions. Action needs to be catalyzed and scaled to ensure the sector transitions towards Net Zero. In 2023, the Value Change Initiative is hosting an Apparel & Footwear Working Group to remove barriers to address and account for Scope 3 emissions in the context of Apparel & Footwear supply chains.

Objective & outcome

The Apparel & Footwear Working Group aims to apply a sector-specific lens to the existing Value Change Guidance to surface needs and topics unique to the industry, thereby ensuring the Guidance supports the realities and complexities of Scope 3 accounting of Category 1 Purchased Goods and Services, including:

  • Critical gaps / concepts in the Guidance that need to be adjusted
  • Areas where more detailed / sector specific guidelines should be developed

The topics explored in the Working Group are collectively defined and developed by the participants, leveraging consensus-driven outcomes. Enabling companies to:

-Improve their sustainability strategy – By learning from best practices and how to enable and create credible impact at scale. 

-Get more impact from Value Chain operations and interventions – By reviewing in detail accounting, verification, reporting and claiming challenges, the working group is able to agree and endorse principles for practice. 

–Be able to credibly claim and co-share impact – By discussing and creating solutions, your organization will be able to identify and co-design solutions that can be credibly implemented and used to ensure co-investment and co-claiming. 

– Be able to influence standards and future policy – By creating outputs with recommendations based on real-life cases and day-to-day challenges, companies provide feedback to standards and other relevant bodies. 

As a final output, the Working Group will produce documents that can serve as sector-specific addendum to the Value Change Guidance. 



Approach & timeline

Using a structured action-learning approach, this Working Group tests the application of the Value Change Guidance documents to ensure they support the realities and complexities of Scope 3 accounting in the Apparel sector. 

The Apparel & Footwear Working Group is structured in five thematic sessions (online and in-person) designed to lead participants from concept introduction and capacity building all the way to application, reporting and verification (verification pathways and pilots are optional, carry an additional fee, and are determined on a case-by-case basis). 

Sessions are focused on participants sharing and interacting with each other to further their understanding of the Guidance and its application to apparel interventions. By presenting their own strategy, interventions and the challenges or issues they may face during implementation, Working Group participants identify common themes and develop shared solutions or conclusions. 



Pricing

Participation fee for the Working Group is €20,000 ($20,000). It grants Implementation Partner access to the VCI and allows for two participants per company to join. Companies may also bring in a supporting consultant under their participation fee. 

Implementation Partners have additional access to the VCI platform, updates, webinars and cross-sector labs. Benefits also include profiling opportunities, joint communication activities and discounted certification fees for pilots that could follow from application of the developed Guidance. 



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