时装品牌怎么做自然战略：先摸清依赖，再用框架落地

October 29, 2026

For the past five years, Kering has been supporting sheep farmers and herders in South Africa’s Eastern Cape. The Umzimvubu is one of the region’s most ecologically diverse landscapes, but thanks to farmer displacement and land segregation in the years since apartheid, nature has started to degrade. Poor land produces poor fleece, which fetches poor prices, leaving farmers without the means to restore the land.

As part of its Regenerative Fund for Nature, Kering has been supporting the transition to regenerative agriculture in this area, slowly restoring the landscape to its former glory, alongside a whole host of collaborators. This comes under the luxury group’s nature strategy — something other brands are finally cottoning on to, as the nature crisis heats up and threatens existing industry structures.

But building a winning nature strategy is no small feat. Where climate action has largely been distilled into decarbonization, nature is sprawling and complex — even more so than fashion supply chains. It encompasses everything from biodiversity to soil health and water scarcity. Trying to wrangle it into neat, easy-to-measure KPIs inevitably means over-simplifying or overlooking something else. It’s a delicate balance of trade-offs and unintended consequences, where meaningful impact means collaborating with a wide array of stakeholders, and success is hard to define.

Despite the difficulties, brands are running out of time to act. From droughts and wildfires to floods and slow, rolling nature degradation, fashion’s nature risks are becoming impossible to ignore. Vogue Business called on experts to share their formula for building a winning nature strategy, including best practices and frameworks to note. It’s a fast-evolving field, with plenty of kinks left to iron out, but there’s no time like the present.

“Don’t wait for a perfect system to tell you what to do about nature,” says Canopy impact director Kari Stoever. “Just get started. Know why you’re doing it, understand your risks and dependencies, and optimize for an incredibly volatile world.”

Start with risks, stumble across opportunities

The first step for a fashion business looking to build out a nature strategy is to assess its nature risks, impacts and dependencies, says Nicole Flores, director of fashion, nature and regenerative landscapes at Conservation International, and a member of the Science-Based Targets Network (SBTN) product development council, which oversees the technical development of guidance for companies around land, water, and oceans. “The company needs to think about the natural resources at the core of its business, like the water used in factories or the land required to grow cotton, or the diversity of plants that cattle graze on.”

In order to map your business’s nature risks and dependencies, you need to engage with your suppliers. Other industries are further ahead than fashion here — most food and beverage companies already know which ingredients are most important to their product, and whether they have to come from a specific place or be produced in a specific way to guarantee the quality and taste customers are used to. Fashion brands don’t necessarily have the same insights.

Take wool: high rainfall can cause wool to become discolored and make the fibers more prone to breakage. If the weather is both hot and humid, the yellow staining can’t be washed out, forcing brands to dye the wool a darker color, affecting the final product design. If the water a factory uses for dye baths is too alkaline or acidic, it can change the adhesion rate or the dye solubility. The fashion production line is riddled with nature dependencies like this.

“In order to pull out the impact of nature, you have to go through that whole, really long, domino chain to figure out where exactly the product breaks down if you can’t get what you want,” says Dr Samuel Sinclair, co-founder of nature consultancy Biodiversify. “You are looking for specific problems that your company has, or specific challenges that people in your company spend a lot of time worrying about.”

Once you have mapped out your nature risks, you have the basis of the business case for investing in nature restoration. Making this business case well is the secret to success, says Sinclair. “There are so many frameworks and metrics and indicators in nature. It’s easy to get sucked into trying to understand all of that intimately. But the most effective sustainability people I know are essentially salespeople. And to be an effective salesperson, you have to figure out what behavior change you’re trying to reach, and outline the fastest, most effective route to get there.”

Lean on holistic, science-based frameworks

Nature is a complex, sprawling beast, which is almost impossible to wrangle into neat, easy-to-measure KPIs. Everything has unintended consequences, and attempting to capture these trade-offs across the whole ecosystem — much of which sits outside of a brand’s control — would paralyze even the most proactive nature lead. But there are a growing number of frameworks brands can lean on, depending on their level of maturity and ambition.

On the big-picture scale, scientists have used the planetary boundaries framework to capture the complexity of the Earth’s systems, and the impact of climate change on all of them. But a framework this holistic can’t simply downscale to fit a fashion supply chain, because it was designed to look at the Earth system “writ large”, explains Stoever. That said, companies can borrow from its system lens to take as broad a view of nature and climate as possible. “As we know, the biosphere and climate are always interacting,” she explains. “The more we can comprehensively look at it as a system, the better we can understand how to manage trade-offs.”

The most common framework is the Science-based Targets for Nature, developed in 2023 by the Science-based Targets Network (SBTN), and piloted by 17 companies, including LVMH, Kering, H&M and L’Occitane. Even before the science-based targets for nature were created, the SBTN was helping businesses set science-based targets across climate and sustainability, and those struggling to push them from target-setting into transformation. That’s why SBTN introduced the AR3T framework in 2020, which now applies to both nature and general science-based targets. AR3T breaks down progress into three phases, which make up a sequential strategy for companies working on nature: avoid and reduce pressures on nature loss; regenerate and restore so that nature can recover; and transform the underlying systems in which companies are embedded to address the drivers of nature loss. “Those first two actions are the bare minimum any company should be doing,” says Flores. “But it’s really important to take the next steps.”

Brands might support the recovery of nature by transitioning the farmers in their supply chain to regenerative agriculture, and they might go further along the transformation path by looking outside their direct supply chain, scaling regenerative agriculture across a whole region, or investing in the restoration of freshwater basins, like Kering.

As nature strategies mature, more brands are taking a landscape approach, looking beyond their own supply chains and collaborating with local partners at the industry and government levels – an acknowledgment that nature doesn’t follow farm boundaries when it comes to biodiversity, says Conservation International’s senior director of global fashion and nature initiatives, Virginia Keesee. “One company can catalyze action, but landscapes require collaboration at the local level and the global level.”

When setting science-based targets for nature, it’s crucial that brands detail exactly how they plan to achieve those targets. Earlier this month, H&M Group published transition plans for its nature targets, including the scope and limitations of its land-use assessment, the key actions and allocated resources for fulfilling its targets in this area, and its methodology for doing so. “The working areas are directly connected to the science-based targets we have set for land,” explains biodiversity impact lead Jennie Granström. “It’s a workstream that brings together our production officers, all of our brands, and the other areas of sustainability.”

Some brands also use the Taskforce for Nature-related Financial Disclosures (TNFD) to work out which nature risks are most material to their bottom line, including LVMH, Breitling and Kering. The TNFD website hosts around 200 illustrative reports, showing how companies in different sectors have implemented the framework, so companies that are new to the process can see where it might lead them, explains CEO Tony Goldner.

While these frameworks can be a useful starting point, it’s important that they “serve the strategy, not become the strategy”, cautions Flores. Outlining your nature-related financial risks, or setting science-based targets for nature, should be the jumping-off point, not the end goal.

Tap into existing nature restoration efforts

Putting the right team in place to implement a nature strategy is essential for success. It might be a small pool, but drawing on existing expertise and learning from someone who has already been through a process of trial and error will supercharge your efforts. “Join groups like the Nature and Biodiversity Peer Group, where there are other people struggling with the same challenge,” Sinclair says. “Even if one person only has 10% of the solution, if you speak to a bunch of people, eventually you will stitch together how to do it.”

The collaborative approach applies when you start implementing your strategy too. To maximize yields, raw material producers need to work as part of a collective, says ecologist and Nature’s Echo author Thomas Crowther, founding co-chair of the Advisory Board for the United Nations Decade on Ecosystem Restoration. He points to the farming communities and cooperatives that have formed in recent years, with the express aim of restoring the common lands surrounding raw material producers. “For so long, farming has been about managing what happens within your own fence. Now, we know that how the landscape around your fence is managed has just as much impact as what you put into your soil.”

In 2020, Crowther founded Restor, the world's largest platform for nature sites, which connects rural and Indigenous communities on the frontlines of nature conservation and restoration with the infrastructure and data they need to scale. Brands are often tempted to buy up land and pay people to restore it, he says, but the gold standard is simply supporting the work that is already happening, and helping it to scale. “Find community-led projects, places where Indigenous communities are already driving restoration, and source directly from them. Sustainable sourcing doesn’t work when it’s imposed on people from the outside. It’s the people who already live in a place, who understand the local biodiversity and the social dynamics, that are best-placed to manage that land. Your investment shouldn’t necessarily change anything; it should just amplify existing efforts.”

Sometimes, for a nature strategy to work, the brand needs to get out of the way, agrees Keesee. “Farmers, herders, ranchers and communities are not simply the beneficiaries of the fund; they are the actors driving its strategy. They’re the ones implementing this on the ground, so any of the companies we work with are coming to the table listening and learning. That’s table stakes now.”

Remain open to complexity

Nature is inherently place-based and context-specific. Because of that, it gets hyper-local and hyper-nuanced very quickly, and as such, it requires engaging with multiple stakeholders, some of whom have never sat around the same table before, and might speak totally different languages, literally and figuratively. They’re also probably funded in different ways, with different expectations of how those funds will be managed and how the returns will be measured.

In landscape-level initiatives like the Regenerative Fund for Nature’s project in the Uzumbubu catchment of South Africa, “the fiber or material serves as the catalyst for investment, which brings companies to the table and provides an economic incentive for the local communities”, explains Keesee. “But it’s a much larger conversation that requires engaging companies from other sectors, municipalities, state and national governments, communal herders and farmers and tribal councils. It can get very nuanced, very quickly.”

Despite the complexities, the need for collaboration is clear. “Nobody can pay for resilience by themselves, because it’s too expensive,” says Kolbe Semhoun. “And nobody can make resilience happen by themselves, because there are too many interdependencies.”

Bella Webb is the sustainability editor at Vogue Business and an associate lecturer at Central Saint Martins. Her coverage spans from raw materials and regulation to supply chain transformation and systems change. Bella regularly moderates panels for agenda-setting organisations, including the British Fashion Council, European Delegation, Global Fashion Summit and ... Read More

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