"Fashion brands’ sustainability reports ‘lack balance’", 10 April 2026

Major apparel brands have consistently emphasised environmental progress over labour conditions in their sustainability reports in the decade following the Rana Plaza disaster, according to a new peer-reviewed study.

...the research...analysed 322 sustainability reports from 69 apparel companies from 2014 to 2021.

They included a focused subsample of 101 reports from 15 brands directly affiliated with the Bangladesh Accord on Fire and Building Safety and the Alliance for Bangladesh Worker Safety...

The researchers found that members of the Accord and the Alliance — the bodies set up to represent brands on worker safety in Bangladesh following the [Rana Plaza] disaster — gave consistently greater coverage to environmental issues such as energy efficiency, water use and greenhouse gas emissions than to worker rights, fair wages and supply chain safety...

They also found that across all topics and all companies, the tone of sustainability reporting was “significantly and increasingly optimistic” throughout the period — a pattern the authors describe as “sector-wide rhetorical optimism” rather than deliberate misrepresentation...

Chemical management — directly relevant to both worker safety and product safety — was the most persistently under-reported of the four material topics assessed...