TheSustainabilityReport⊙⊙⊙2024GSMLTTTMUNICHFABRICAddSTARTAddANO-RRCEAOMINTERLINEA Year In SustainabilityWhy fashion will be forced to confront climate change and inequality.And how thetechnology sector is aiming to support it.By Ben HansonEditor-in-ChiefTHE INTERLINETime can be pretty elastic.It's very easy to sound alarmist (even though the klaxons havebeen righteously sounding for decades now)if you spotlightIf you're a geologist examining ancient rock formations,forweather in the here and now,because weather can beexample,a year doesn't mean a great deal.But if you're a trendunpredictable.And it's easy to come across as passive if youanalyst working to document fast-moving markets,chart newlook at climate in the longer term-making it feel like a distantchannels,spot frefly-lifespan moments and communities,orconcern to people with more pressing ones,like the cost ofcatalogue the whims of emerging demographics,twelvefood staples.political upheaval at their front door,ormonths is an eternity.persistent,institutional inequality to try and wrestle with.And if you're a business owner or financial officer evaluatingBut it seems like the quickening pace of change is going tofour quarters of up-and-down performance shaped by thesolve that problem.Because what a year means,on themacro-economic rollercoaster,a year can rush and dragplanetary calendar,is compressing in a very visible way.Anddepending on how and when you slice it.the impacts of that compression are highly likely to become notjust observable in the abstract,but tangible in personal andHow we perceive the importance of a year depends heavily onprofessional ways for basically of us.our perspective.Over the last thirty or so years,the rate of sea level rise at theBut from an environmental sustainability point of view,there'sUS coastline has doubled from its long-term trend,which wasset in the century or so prior.And it appears essentially locked-only one timeline that matters-and on that timeline every yearin (i.e.nothing we can do will stop it)that the same sea levelscounts.Because if you're a progressively heating planet,or oneof the billions of people who those rising temperatures impactacross the United States will rise,on average,by as much in thenext 25 years as they did in the previous 100.And an IPCC(either subtly,or profoundly as part of a worsening pattern)report suggests that global sea levels could be more than athen a lot can happen in a year.metre higher by 2100 than they are today.This elasticity of time is one of the hardest things to debatesensibly when it comes to climate change.And it's somethingHere,we're talking about significant transformations that willoccur between 25 and 75 years from today -all within theI've struggled with finding the right way to talk about since TheInterline introduced our first Sustainability Report in 2023.lifespan of people alive or being born at the moment.At apersonal level,this means we are highly likely to have to