When the American Apparel & Footwear Association launched its heat-stress toolkit at Cascale’s annual meeting in Athens on Thursday, it marked the industry’s most significant effort yet to confront the escalating threat that rising global temperatures pose to garment workers. It also served as a tacit admission from supply-chain leaders that whatever playbook they have relied on to confront climate change’s social impacts can no longer withstand the record heat upending conditions on the production floor.
Extreme heat is by no means a fashion-only issue. More than 70 percent of the global workforce—some 2.4 billion workers—is exposed to excessive heat on the job, resulting in about 23 million occupational injuries and nearly 19,000 deaths annually, according to the International Labour Organization. But the industry is also uniquely exposed. The vast majority of the world’s clothing is produced in the global South, particularly in Asia, where heat-related risks are already widespread and temperatures inside manufacturing facilities can be significantly higher than they are outside.
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Not helping is the fact that the heat-stress season is extending in many manufacturing hubs, said Sarah Krasley, a visiting fellow at Cornell University’s ILR Global Labor Institute, which has for years examined extreme heat as a labor and supply-chain risk in apparel production. In Bangladesh, for instance, scorching temperatures in 2025 persisted into September and October—peak-production months when garment workers are rushing to fill back-to-school and holiday orders.
“Workers are telling us over and over again that it is too hot,” she said during a panel on the conference’s third day, when heat served as a loose unifying theme. “Their medicine prices and electricity costs spike during heat waves. There is already plenty of research out there—we need to trust their lived experience, stop treating heat as an ‘emerging issue,’ and get on with solving it.”
The toolkit, while by no means perfect, offers a necessary starting point for tackling the issue in concrete terms, said Nate Herman, AAFA’s executive vice president. Building on the trade group’s earlier guidance, it shifts from high-level advice on how heat-stress thresholds and programs generally work to specific formulas, decision-making pathways and workbooks that can help companies put those measures into day-to-day practice. Just as important, it was shaped by a broad coalition of stakeholders that Cascale helped convene.
The toolkit is divided into two complementary tracks based on each audience’s operational role. The AAFA Heat Guidance Working Group, comprising brands, manufacturers and worker-advocacy groups, developed brand implementation guidelines and a supplier survey for buyers, while the Fashion Producer Collective, a producer-led sustainability think tank, authored manufacturer-focused guidelines and a workbook for factories.
Herman told Sourcing Journal during a break between panels that those responsible for implementing heat-risk solutions also need to play an active role in designing them to ensure interventions are tailored to local conditions.
“If you have a custom-built, single-floor factory or a seven-floor building that houses multiple facilities, you’re going to face different opportunities and challenges,” he said. “Certain processes—ironing versus cutting versus sewing, for instance—also make a big difference in terms of heat impact.”
That’s why, rather than prescribing a one-size-fits-all threshold, the manufacturer workbook allows factory managers to plug in local environmental data and indoor conditions to generate tailored thermal limits. From there, it walks them through building a heat-management program around that benchmark, including worker training and engagement requirements, clear action plans for extreme-heat days and suitable engineering controls.
The buyer guidelines assign brands a parallel responsibility: Rather than merely asking suppliers whether they have adopted a specific heat threshold, brands are urged to assess whether factories have established a threshold, implemented a heat-management program and put in place metrics to evaluate whether interventions are working.
The toolkit is designed as a living document, with updates planned each spring to incorporate new feedback, research and best practices, Herman said. But while there is consensus on the need to act, disagreements remain over how to do it. One flashpoint at the conference was whether investments in factory heat remediation can deliver returns quickly enough to persuade suppliers.
Cornell’s research suggests they can. Its analysis of small and medium-sized factories in Bangladesh found that heat-remediation investments require average capital expenditures of $127,000, plus roughly $14,000 in annual operating costs, with estimated payback periods of one to four years.
But a workable ROI shouldn’t be mistaken for a windfall, said Priydarshini Gouthi, senior manager of ESG and innovation at Shahi Exports. Speaking on a different panel, she said that heat mitigation is less about generating new efficiencies or “super profits” than about avoiding deeper losses when extreme heat slows production.
“That’s why we need shared responsibility,” she said. “We need all of us to come together and say, ‘Here’s how we can help each other solve this challenge.’ Whether that is the future of the business, going back to responsible purchasing practices, the commercial practices, the expectations—if those don’t fit with the solutions, we won’t see the progress we need to see.”
That misalignment is particularly evident in the pressures on manufacturers, said Vidhura Ralapanawe, executive vice president at Epic Group. Because heat stress alters factories’ cost structures, he added, the business relationship must account for—and help share—those added expenses rather than leaving suppliers to absorb them alone.
Ralapanawe warned the industry not to repeat the mistakes of early decarbonization initiatives, when brands resisted sharing the costs of green upgrades on the assumption that factories would eventually recoup them through efficiency gains. Heat adaptation, he said, should be manufacturer-led and brand-supported.
“If I’m planning my overheads, assuming that I’m producing 100,000 units per day, and because of heat stress during certain months, I’m only hitting 75,000 pieces a day, those overheads are actually going up,” Ralapanawe said. “I think it’s easy to set guidelines for factories, but that just means that we are passing the full burden of this onto a factory.”
For Jeff Vockrodt, president and CEO of the Fair Labor Association, that need for shared responsibility reflects a larger imperative. When outdoor temperatures reach 90 degrees Fahrenheit, factory floors can easily exceed 100 degrees, making heat protection a nonnegotiable investment in workforce stability, risk management and supply-chain resilience, he said.
Not that brands need to start from scratch. The “essential fundamentals” of responsible business conduct still apply, he said.
“In many cases, the same tools that have helped you face any other human rights challenge can be the key to success here,” Vockrodt said. “Getting sustainability teams working closely with sourcing and procurement, supply chain mapping, risk assessments to target your efforts, responsible purchasing practices so suppliers don’t need to keep production going no matter what the temperature.”
Worker voice, too, is critical, especially in times of change, he said, noting that transitions produce vastly different outcomes when workers have a seat at the table than when they don’t. This isn’t a “courtesy” but rather a form of risk mitigation, he said. A supplier that cannot retain workers, faces strikes or becomes embroiled in a labor scandal can face operational risks comparable to a factory that loses power or is flooded.
“From a business perspective, workers are partners in navigating change with insight, with resilience,” Vockrodt said. “In the context of heat stress, modifying factories, infrastructure and practices in consultation with workers can both protect workers from serious injury and result in more reliable factory uptime.”
Herman said AAFA’s toolkit is meant to give brands and manufacturers a way forward—and reveal the questions that will inevitably emerge when heat protections move from paper to practice.
Not all of them will have immediate answers. Moving production to cooler nighttime hours, for example, may be untenable for predominantly female garment workers, many of whom are responsible for caregiving. Pausing work on high-heat days may protect workers but cut the earnings of those paid by the piece. In Bangladesh, an unreliable power grid makes air conditioning—an emissions tradeoff in its own right—far from a universal solution. And if work stops on dangerously hot days and orders fall behind, who bears the cost?
“Many of these issues, we might just be guessing at because nobody’s actually gone as far as going through a full implementation,” he said. “Some manufacturers have, but not everybody has. And certainly, the communication between brands and manufacturers is nonexistent for the most part on this issue.”
Still, even difficult questions must be confronted because the industry can’t begin to learn until it starts acting, Herman said. As with any strategic adjustment, that will require securing sufficient buy-in from both ends of the sourcing equation.
“If our workers are sick all the time, or worse, we’re not going to get our product anyway, and we’re not going to be able to sell,” he said. “We need to deal with this issue, and we can’t wait any longer.”
