Copenhagen International Fashion Trade Show

Ladies and gentlemen, Kære venner :

It's a real pleasure for me to be back home in Denmark tonight. Thank you, Christian and the Copenhagen International Fashion Trade Show, for bringing us together.

Now, I very much want this to be a two-way discussion and I look forward to your thoughts and reactions at the end of my talk.

After all, on the face of it, it may seem a bit unusual to have a senior diplomat from the United Nations be keynote speaker at a fashion week.

But I hope that, at the end, you’ll agree with Christian and me that not only is it not unusual, it’s actually the kind of discussion we need to have; it’s exactly the kind of connection we need to make.
And here’s why: the United Nations, today, is about much more than high politics, secret negotiations and peacekeeping missions in faraway lands. It’s also about the way we lead our lives, it’s about the way we can preserve the planet for future generations, it’s about how we can ensure that every person living on the planet can live lives of dignity, freedom and fulfilment.

And fashion? I don’t need to tell you that fashion is about much more than dazzling dresses. As Coco Chanel once said: “Fashion is in the sky, in the street, fashion has to do with ideas, the way we live, [and with] what is happening.”

So there you have it: on a very fundamental level, there is overlap between what you and I do. And I believe there is a thing or two that we can learn from each other.

Here, then, is what I want to do tonight:
̶ First, take a step back and frame our discussion by reflecting on the state of the world we live in now. You won’t be surprised if I tell you it’s not all good news.
̶ Two, outline what we can - and are - doing about it.
̶ And three, connect it to you on at least two levels: you as representatives of the fashion industry; and you as individuals.

Let’s start with the state of the world.

Last week, I was at the World Economic Forum in Davos with the UN Secretary-General, Antonio Guterres.
Asked how he sees the world, he answered with just one sentence: “We are in a world,” he said, “in which global challenges are more and more integrated and the responses are more and more fragmented.”

Let me unpack that - starting with the challenges.

Just turn on the news, and there is plenty to make you despair. Images of human misery; poverty; violence; hatred; bigotry; racism – it can all seem overwhelming.

Then there are the larger, the global, the existential threats we face.

Above all, climate change.

There is no greater challenge to the world of today and tomorrow.

Tonight, we are spending about one hour together. In this single hour, four million tons of carbon dioxide will be emitted; 1,500 hectares of forests will be cut; and three species will go extinct. During this hour, the pollution that already resides in our atmosphere will trap as much heat as would be released by detonating over 16,600 Hiroshima class atomic bombs. All in just one hour.

The impact is clear: Millions of people and trillions of assets are at risk from extreme droughts, floods, hurricanes, and rising seas.

Climate change is a direct threat in itself and a multiplier of many other threats – from poverty to displacement to conflict.

What compounds the challenge is that all of the above – poverty, displacement, conflict – obstructs action to address climate change.

You cannot ask people who are struggling to find enough to eat today to worry about what happens to the planet tomorrow. Worrying about climate change is a luxury many simply cannot afford.

This means inequality and climate change are mutually reinforcing. To resolve the latter, we cannot ignore the former.

Neither is happening at a fast-enough rate. In fact, it may even be going in reverse.

Last year, the wealth of the world’s billionaires increased by $900 billion, that’s $2.5 billion every single day.

This huge increase could have ended global extreme poverty seven times over. Instead, the wealth of the nearly four billion people who make up the poorest half of the world actually fell by over 10%.

Entire regions and countries fail to catch up to the waves of progress, left behind in the Rust Belts of our world.

Can you blame them if they lose trust in the system?

And it’s not just governments that lose the trust of their citizens.

When companies fire thousands of employees one day, and report record profits and dividends the next, it’s not surprising that many wonder whether the social contract between business and society has been superseded by a contract between business and shareholders.

Amidst growing anxiety and eroding trust, our societies polarize - politically, economically and socially.

In such a context, explanations can sound like excuses – and people can become easy targets for nationalists, populists and all those who profit from fear of the future and who paint idealized images of the past.

But the question is: were things really better in the past?

We can approach this question by way of a short hypothetical: If you had to choose one moment in history in which to be born, and you did not know whether you were going to be male or female, which country you were going to be from, or what your status was, which time would you choose?
The answer is at the heart of what we can call the ‘optimist’s view’ of the world and in turns on its head much of the gloom and doom we confront in the news.

Why? Because you would have a hard time justifying choosing anything other than the present. Because if you chose today, in most places you would be less likely to be living in poverty; less likely to be illiterate; less likely to confront intolerance and oppression; and less likely to die of diseases or be killed in a war than at any time in human history.

Much of this incredible story of progress happened in the past seven decades.

With few exceptions, poverty has been reduced more in the last 50 years than in the previous 500 years.

90% of all scientists that ever lived are alive today and our scientific understanding of the world is more advanced today than it ever was. To understand the unprecedented pace of progress in our lifetime – just consider that your cellphone has more computing power than the Apollo space capsule that landed the first humans on the moon in 1969!

Progress continues as we speak. I mentioned before how much harm we inflict on our planet in the span of just 60 minutes. But within that hour, it is also true that the number of people who live on less than $2 a day actually goes down by 9,000 every hour; that every hour, 12,500 people gain access to clean drinking water around the world.

So what are we to make of all this? You can paint a plausible picture of the world on the brink of collapse, but you can equally sketch out why we might just be living in the best of times.

I would draw three insights.

First, the challenges are real, existential, and among the most dangerous we ever faced. But they are all man-made. Nothing – not climate change, not technological disruption, not inequality – is independent of human action. We are the masters of our fate. Our actions matter.

And this means that secondly, we have the ability to resolve them. The point of the incredible stories of progress in our recent past is that we have reasons to be optimistic. Not blind optimism, but hard-earned optimism, rooted in very real progress.

Thirdly, any action to safeguard the good of the past and to resolve the challenges of the future must be global and universal. We simply cannot successfully deal with the multiplicity of challenges we face either sequentially or in isolation.

Geopolitically, the past couple of years are generally narrated as a breakdown of global collaboration. Tensions rose, conflicts deepened, protectionism resurfaced.

That is also what’s at the heart of the Secretary-General’s point about the “fragmentation” of our political response.

All true. But only part of the picture. Amidst the background noise of bellicose rhetoric, the 193 Member States of the United Nations actually agreed on something truly groundbreaking.

Some three years ago, they agreed the most ambitious development agenda in human history – the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.

The 2030 Agenda is the logical, necessary conclusion from the three insights I just outlined – human agency, optimism, and universality.

The 2030 Agenda constitutes universal recognition that the challenges faced by any one of us may swiftly become crises faced by all – carbon emissions know no boundaries, distant conflicts lead to refugee flows and weak healthcare systems in a remote island state can lead to worldwide pandemics.

The 2030 Agenda grasps that these challenges cannot effectively be met by tinkering around the edges of economic, social and political governance, but require a more fundamental shift.

With 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs for short) and 169 specific targets, we have a detailed roadmap of what needs to be done.

They address everything from ending poverty (Goal 1) and achieving gender equality (Goal 5) to decent work and equitable economic growth (Goal 8) to the rule of law (Goal 16).

Achieving these goals would create a world that is comprehensively sustainable: socially fair; environmentally secure; economically prosperous; inclusive; and more predictable.

Let’s take stock then of where we are in making the plan a reality.

Here, we should recognize that the picture is mixed.

One the one hand, the diagnosis is increasingly accepted by everyone: our planet cannot sustain the demands our lifestyle imposes on it.

We need to change, and we need to do so fast.

But top-down change imposed by government policy will not be enough. Not even close.

To succeed, we need everyone, everywhere - governments, international organizations, civil society, and the private sector - to get on board, to come together and to work together.

Which brings me to the third and to me the most important point I want to talk to you about tonight and that is your role, your responsibility in all of this.

Fashion - and the $2.5 trillion industry underpinning it - can be a powerful force for good.

But let me be frank: For now, it’s too often part of the problem.

Indeed, it’s a social and environmental emergency.

20% of the world’s waste water is produced by the fashion industry. A staggering figure, but not hard to believe, given that it takes almost 8000 liters of water just to make one pair of blue jeans.

The fashion industry emits 10% of global carbon emissions - that’s more than the emissions of all international flights and all of maritime shipping combined!

The problems continue up and down the supply chain: starting with factory workers exploited for little pay and with even fewer rights, all the way to consumers buying more and buying it more cheaply, but discarding it just as quickly.

And now imagine a fashion industry that turns sustainable:
̶ 75 million workers - many of them women in the developing world - who are paid fair wages. ̶ Designers who are sourcing fabrics that are recyclable.
̶ Labels that demand transparency from producers and impose ethical, environmental standards.

None of this is rocket science. We largely know what needs to be done. But to actually do it takes courage and vision.

The potential upside is tremendous - and it would extend far beyond the industry itself.

That’s because fashion - more than any other industry - shapes lifestyles. Recall Coco Chanel’s observation from before and you see what I’m getting at: fashion can make sustainability fashionable, and that’s about much more than just the clothes we wear.

Conditions are ripe: you see it in virtually every industry. The smart money is on sustainability. People want to invest sustainably, consume sustainably, live sustainably. Businesses can help them realize this aspiration. If you don’t, a competitor probably will.

But as I said at the outset, there are two dimensions to the question of responsibility. One, the responsibility of the trillion-dollar fashion industry. And two, the individual responsibility of every one of us.

You may wonder why - after speaking about challenges as global and existential as climate change, and plans as ambitious and long-term as the 2030 Agenda - I put such emphasis on the individual level.

It’s because only once we begin to take ownership at that level - the personal level - that change really becomes, well, real.

It starts with simple, everyday actions. Individually, they may not amount to much; taken together, they are the change.

None of this is abstract: in fact, I’ve brought with me a small booklet outlining 170 Daily Actions created by my Office that drive home this point. And I encourage you all to take one with you.
I’m closing on this note, because if there’s one thing I want you to take away from what I’ve said, it’s this: our actions have consequences. Our efforts make a difference. And in times like ours, where the stakes really could not be higher, we cannot afford to be bystanders.

Everyone one of us must take responsibility, and together we can not only defuse the challenges we face, but in the process create the world we want to live in.

I really believe that. And I hope you do too.

Thank you. Takk.