AI-driven tech can revolutionise global fast fashion industry: Study

Artificial intelligence (AI)-driven technologies can be harnessed for climate action and significantly advance environmental and market performance in the fast fashion industry, according to a new study by an international team of researchers.

Research by the University of New South Wales (UNSW) Business School’s David Grant found AI-powered climate service innovation models can improve energy efficiency, reduce emissions and increase renewable energy sources.

“Our study’s findings have shown enormous potential for helping companies achieve emissions-related targets and meet their reporting and assurance obligations related to Scope 1, 2, and 3 emissions as defined under the World Resources Institute and World Business Council for Sustainable Development Greenhouse Gas Protocol (2004),” said Grant in a release from the university.

AI-driven technologies can be harnessed for climate action and significantly advance environmental and market performance in the fast fashion industry, a new study found.
The study showed enormous potential for helping firms achieve emissions-related targets and meet their reporting and assurance obligations related to Scope 1, 2, and 3 emissions.

AI-powered climate service solutions are technologies like big data and machine learning that can reduce routine, repetitive, simple and standardised tasks, explained Grant, senior deputy director at the UNSW Institute for Climate Risk & Response.

These include emission measurement, calculating individual products’ carbon footprint, identifying risk factors, forecasting demand to reduce waste and climate education.

The fast fashion industry, one of the world’s biggest polluters, employs some 75 million people and is valued at over $2.5 trillion. It is responsible for about 10 per cent of global carbon emissions.

“Due to AI’s unique capacity to collect, integrate, and interpret big data sets, our proposed AI framework provides a data-driven approach to address climate risks, focusing on the environment, infrastructure, and market in an actionable and systematic manner,” explained lead author of the study Shahriar Akter, associate dean (research) at the faculty of business & law, University of Wollongong in Australia.

The survey, titled ‘Unleashing the Power of Artificial Intelligence for Climate Action in Industrial Markets’, interviewed 211 managers at manufacturing companies in Bangladesh with at least one year of experience using basic AI-powered climate service solutions.

“AI-powered climate service innovations can enable firms to adopt innovations that reduce the environmental impact of its business activities while improving energy and material efficiency and managing climate-related risks and opportunities. They also facilitate mitigation by reducing the firm’s carbon footprint, can identify and manage vulnerabilities, forecast hazards and provide basic climate research and education to managers and employees,” Grant added.

Fibre2Fashion News Desk (DS)