Stand.earth developed the 2025 Fossil Free Fashion Scorecard to map changes within the fashion industry by assessing progress made by companies to decarbonize their supply chains over a 2-year period. The findings evaluate trends and developments since the publication of the previous Fossil-Free Fashion Scorecards, published in March 2023 and August 2021, as well as building on a deep dive into clean energy practices published in May 2024.
Brands:
The report analyses 42 leading apparel and footwear companies on their commitments, actions and transparency surrounding efforts to reduce their carbon footprints in line with the 1.5°C emissions pathway.
This year, five new brands were added to the research sample due to their growing prominence across the global market. These companies were Abercrombie & Fitch, Aritzia, Bestseller, Mango and Next. A handful of companies were removed from this year’s scorecard, to balance the number of sportswear, fast fashion and luxury brands assessed: ALDO, Amer Sports, Salvatore Ferragamo, Guess, Richemont, and Amazon.
Criteria:
The 2025 scorecard criteria was built off the foundation of the Clean Energy Close up and 2023 scorecard criteria through a process of internal development and external review by independent experts and stakeholder organizations. Stand.earth gratefully acknowledges the following for their contributions to the development and refinement of the 2025 Scorecard assessment criteria (in alphabetical order):
- Josh Archer, Stand.earth
- Anna Barford, Stand.earth
- Elly Dinnadge, Canopy
- Ruth MacGilp, Action Speaks Louder
- Md. Razu Ahmed Masum
- Urska Trunk, Changing Markets
- Dr. Vidhura Ralapanawe
Evaluation:
Stand.earth used publicly available resources to evaluate the performance of all 42 companies. This included corporate sustainability, ESG and integrated annual reports, online documents including press releases, websites, media publications and where accessible, CDP reports.
It is critical to note that, since the publication of the 2023 Scorecard, many CDP reports containing important data on climate-related performance have been removed from the public domain. Therefore, the research has been reliant on brands who publicly disclose their CDP reports on their website or have submitted their CDP reports directly to Stand.earth.
Alongside secondary data, Stand.earth reached out to all companies to request the completion of a survey, prompting answers on the impact assessment criteria and indicators outlined below. Brands were provided with the scoring matrix for full transparency over scoring criteria. Answers submitted to Stand.earth were cross-referenced and verified against publicly available data. Draft scorecards were shared with brands again, inviting further dialogue and feedback on any additional information that should be included and was not yet publicly available.
Data collection took place from January to April 15 of 2025. It is important to note that due to changes in reporting requirements and schedules, particularly in the EU as a result of the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD), reporting for financial years may vary by brand, depending on the geography of headquarters and company annual reporting cadence.
With the data derived from both brands and Stand.earth’s independent research, numerical scores and grades were assigned to individual performance across five different impact areas.
As with previous Scorecards, Stand.earth assigned grades to the five impact areas on a scale of A to F, with A being the highest and F being the lowest. This determined the overall score based on the weighting of each area.
