Designing for Nature: Fashion’s Role in Protecting Biodiversity
With Dr. Mirjam Hazenbosch
Interview by Stella Hertantyo
Dr. Mirjam Hazenbosch is a Senior Consultant at the UK’s leading corporate biodiversity consultancy, Biodiversify. She is an expert on biodiversity sustainability in the fashion industry, with more than a decade of experience in biodiversity conservation.
Currently at Biodiversify Mirjam leads groundbreaking work with the fashion company Primark to support them in implementing and growing their biodiversity improvement programs. To make this happen, she works closely with the retailer, local ecologists, local cotton farmers in India, and manufacturers in Bangladesh to agree on how to reach the company’s goal of "restoring biodiversity by 2030."
I interviewed Mirjam in the Conscious Fashion Collective Membership about:
Fashion’s impact on biodiversity,
Where to begin when measuring a brand’s impact on biodiversity,
And what kinds of jobs are emerging at the intersection of fashion and biodiversity conservation.
Below are some of the highlights from the conversation. Inside our membership, you'll find the full recording with more insights from Mirjam (plus unlock our entire session library and resource hub, attend our live events, and connect with a values-aligned community).
What led you to the positions you hold today?
Currently I’m a Senior Consultant at Biodiversify. This means that I get to work with a lot of businesses, especially fashion businesses, on biodiversity and how they can act for nature.
I’m specifically interested in the intersection between agriculture — where a lot of fashion’s raw materials are produced — and nature conservation. I want to figure out how we can ensure that everyone has the food and clothes they need while safeguarding the environment and livelihoods.
My interest in agriculture and nature conservation comes from growing up in the Netherlands. While I was growing up, I got to volunteer on the farms of family friends. At the same time, my parents had an annual pass to a local zoo, so I got to see a lot of wildlife.
I continued to pursue these interests by studying biology at University College Utrecht. When I finished my studies there, I went to Oxford University to do my PhD.
At Oxford University, my PhD research focused on the interaction between agriculture and nature conservation in Papua New Guinea. I spent three years traveling between Oxford and Madang in Papua New Guinea, running around tropical rainforests and growing my own sweet potatoes, figuring out how we can farm more sustainably, and speaking to farmers to understand their challenges and opportunities.
While I was in Papua New Guinea, what became glaringly obvious to me was the massive impact that businesses, especially international businesses, have on the environment and livelihoods. I wanted to understand this more, which is why I joined the corporate world as a consultant.
First I worked for Proforest, which is an organization that works with international food companies to advocate for agricultural and forestry production and sourcing that delivers positive outcomes for people, nature, and climate.
Then, a few years ago, I transitioned to Biodiversify which is where I am today.
How does the fashion industry impact biodiversity?
“Biodiversity” seems like a technical term, but when you break it down, it’s quite simple. It comes from two words — the Greek word “bios” which means “life”, and the Latin word “diversity” which means “variety”. So biodiversity means “variety of life”.
It refers to all the living organisms that you can see around you, such as trees, animals, and microorganisms. Microorganisms include the bacteria that live on your skin and in your gut. All of this is part of the living systems around us and is what we call biodiversity.
Unfortunately, biodiversity isn’t doing well at the moment. We're losing species at a rapid rate to the extent that scientists have declared the sixth mass extinction of biodiversity to be underway. The last time we had a mass extinction was when we lost the dinosaurs. It’ll have a massive impact on life on Earth.
Fashion contributes to biodiversity in multiple ways. There are five major threats to biodiversity — habitat loss and sea use change, over-exploitation of resources, climate change, invasive species, and pollution. Fashion is linked to all of these threats.
The main threats of the fashion sector on biodiversity are habitat loss and sea use change, pollution, and climate change.
What this means is that habitats are being converted into farms or they’re being mined for minerals or petrochemicals. Some research has shown that about half of the world’s agricultural fields are now linked to the fashion sector in one way or the other.
Think about all the cotton that needs to be grown or sheep and cows that need to be reared for wool and leather production. This all requires taking land away from the wilder areas where other species can thrive.
The second way in which fashion is having a massive impact on biodiversity is through pollution. Clothing manufacturing requires a lot of chemicals. When these chemicals enter natural environments around factories or at the end of life, they affect living organisms.
The final major impact that the fashion sector has on biodiversity is climate change. The fashion industry is global. The fabric might be produced in one country, then made into a garment in another country, then sold in a third country, and perhaps shipped to a fourth country to be sold in-store. All of this travel has a massive carbon footprint, which contributes to climate change. Climate change impacts biodiversity due to changes in weather and changes in temperatures.
When working with global brands that have complicated supply chains, where do you begin when measuring their impacts and deciding how to take action?
The good news is that while big fashion brands have huge impacts on biodiversity, they also have the capacity and resources to create positive impacts on biodiversity. At Biodiversify we are trying to get more big brands to make change happen.
Picture from Dr Hazenbosch's LinkedIn
Our approach depends on the business. No one business is the same and they all have unique problems. The first step we take at Biodiversify is to fully understand the business we are working with.
We want to understand: What drives them? Who are we working with directly? Who are the other people in the business that need to know about the work we are doing? How are decisions being made? Why do they even care about biodiversity? Why do they want a strategy on biodiversity? We ask a lot of questions to delve into the psychological side of the business before we start any actual work.
Once we have a good idea of what the problem is, and why the client is asking us to come and support them, we usually end up doing what we call a Biodiversity Risk Assessment. We’ve done that for Kering, for example, by using the Science Based Targets for Nature methods.
In those basic assessments, we gather the data that the company has on its supply chain and look at where the company has the biggest impacts and dependencies on biodiversity. For example, if a company sources a lot of cotton, then that’s a major area where they are impacting biodiversity.
We look at where their biggest dependencies on biodiversity are too, because all of these companies depend on there being raw materials that they can source and turn into products. So they are reliant on a healthy environmental system.
After we’ve done the assessment, we look at the outcomes and work with the company to decide where and how they can best take action for biodiversity.
Can you give us an example of your work where you have been able to work with a brand to address biodiversity impact?
At Biodiversify, I’ve been working with Primark — we’ve been working with them for over three years now. We started by doing a Biodiversity Risk Assessment. Not surprisingly, their biggest impact and dependency was their sourcing of cotton.
From there, we dove into the cotton side of Primark’s supply chain to see where we could make changes that protect biodiversity. Luckily, they already knew that cotton was a major part of their business. Since 2013, they’ve been setting up the Primark Sustainable Cotton Program.
This is a training program where they train farmers in the areas that they source from to think about how they can farm more sustainably using fewer chemical fertilizers, fewer pesticides and less water.
It started with a few thousand farmers in 2013 and now they’ve trained approximately 300,000 farmers across Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh. They said that through this program, they are likely to positively impact biodiversity, which is a good hypothesis, but we needed to know for sure.
So we began to look at the impact that their Sustainable Cotton Program had on biodiversity and whether Primark can do even more for biodiversity. We set up a research project where we investigate how the Program is impacting biodiversity in and around the cotton farms that Primark sources from.
We’ve been working with Primark’s partners called Cotton Connect and with local ecologists who do biodiversity surveys on the ground so that we can improve the Program and ensure that Primark reaches its goal of restoring biodiversity by 2030.
How can people best prepare themselves to work as a consultant in their niche in sustainable fashion?
There are two elements to my job — the biodiversity element, and the consulting element. The biodiversity element is quite a niche. To work in biodiversity, it’s useful to have a background in ecology or conservation, either through a degree or work experience. But it’s also possible to pick up this knowledge on the job.
The skills you use as a consultant are transferable skills that you can pick up in most jobs. The first skill that’s important to have as a consultant is to be able to pitch well. As a consultant, you often meet people in an online webinar, or at a conference, and you need to be able to grab their attention quickly and pitch to them about why they should care about biodiversity and your work.
Once you have signed a contract to work with a client, it’s important to have good project management skills. You need to manage teams, time, and budgets.
The ability to analyze data is also a useful skill to have as a consultant. Depending on what type of person you are, you might want to focus more on the project management side or more on the data analytics side, because a good team requires a mix of these skills. I focus on both, because it keeps me on my toes.
Good presentation skills are also important. You often have to present to people at a C-Level, to sustainability teams, or at conferences and webinars. You need to be able to get people’s attention and keep them interested in what you’re saying.
The final skill I think you should develop is networking. As a consultant, a big part of your job is talking to people and making connections.
For those that do have an interest in biodiversity and conservation, what kinds of jobs do you see opening up in fashion?
The biodiversity sector is an exciting space to be in at the moment. There’s a lot of momentum building up around nature, biodiversity, and conservation. It’s good to keep an eye open for jobs within companies and at consultancies.
I’ve noticed several businesses hiring Biodiversity Managers and Nature Managers.
There’s a lot of new legislation in the EU, such as the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive and the EU Deforestation Regulation. A lot of companies are feeling daunted by this and are looking to hire people to help them figure out how to be compliant.
Then there are people like me who advise businesses on what next steps to take to protect nature. So there are a lot of job openings for biodiversity consultants now as well.
Are there any research gaps that you think need to be filled?
Firstly, we need to figure out how to better recycle garments. More research that looks into how we can improve recycling systems would be useful.
Another research area that I think needs to be further explored is how to monitor and report on biodiversity in a unified way. There are many ways to monitor and report on biodiversity. It’s not as clear-cut as monitoring and reporting on climate where there are clear metrics and indicators.
With biodiversity, there are metrics and indicators, but there is no consensus about what to measure exactly and how to monitor and report on it. This is a big barrier for businesses, because if they don’t know what to measure, it’s much harder to convince them that they should care about these issues.
What needs to be urgently addressed to promote biodiversity protection in fashion? What does it take to align corporate operations with the protection of natural resources, in practice? Are there any go-to resources and books that you frequent often related to biodiversity? What are your tips for pitching a sustainability project? How does Biodiversify measure the biodiversity impacts of synthetic materials?
To hear from Mirjam on these topics and much more, watch the full recording in the Conscious Fashion Collective Membership!