This website uses cookies to ensure you get the best experience while browsing it. By clicking 'Got It' you're accepting these terms.
Most recent
Trending
The best of EcoWatch, right in your inbox. Sign up for our email newsletter!
Milan Fashion Week closed on Sunday with the second annual "Green Carpet Fashion Awards" to promote sustainability in the fashion industry, Reuters reported.
The event, promoted by Italy's fashion association CNMI and the sustainability consultancy Eco-Age, gathered celebrities like Julianne Moore, Colin Firth and Cate Blanchett with fashion icons like Cindy Crawford and Anna Wintour to award 13 statuettes made from ethically mined gold, The Guardian reported.
"People called last year's Green Carpet awards the Oscars of sustainable fashion," Eco-Age founder Livia Firth said. "I hope that soon we will just be the Oscars of fashion."
Winners included model Elle Macpherson, who took home The Wellness Award, new this year to acknowledge the importance that human wellness plays in environmental sustainability, Eco-Age reported.
"Fashion can be very beautiful and lucrative, but to be here for a real purpose for me is important," Machpherson told Reuters.
Other winners included Donatella Versace, who took home The CNMI in Recognition for Sustainability Award for Versace's commitment to going fur free, as well as its designing of green retail spaces and attempts to create a people-centered company culture, Cameron Russell, who won The Changemaker Award for fighting back against harassment in modelling and Sinéad Burke, who won The Leader Award for "changing the fashion conversation for good," Eco-Age said.
Burke, who has dwarfism, campaigns to make fashion more inclusive.
"The influence of fashion shapes culture," she asked the audience, according to The Guardian. "What will you do with your privilege to make this space more accessible?"
The awards also honored sustainable production techniques. The Australian Woolmark farmers won The Eco Stewardship Award for their sustainable wool production. Frumat Leather won the Technology and Innovation Award for a leather made from apple waste that is "of such quality and appeal that it can displace animal leather," Eco-Age said.
The awards, however, came days after a New York Times story cast doubt on the ethical practices of Italian fashion, The Guardian reported.
The investigation, published Sept. 20, reported how home workers in the region of Puglia, Italy were doing sewing for luxury garments without contracts or insurance, sometimes earning as little as a euro per hour.
CNMI President Carlo Capasa said he was "saddened and concerned" by the report, according to The Guardian, but that the problem was larger than Italy.
"Rather than 'this is Italy'," he said, "I would say 'this is the world'."
However, there was a recognition among participants and award winners that they were part of a powerful industry working to right its past wrongs.
Renzo Rosso, along with Diego Della Valle, won the CNMI in recognition for Community and Social Justice Award for reinvesting in communities, including those devastated by earthquakes, according to Eco-Age.
"People like all of us destroyed the world. But now, we are trying to make it better for our children," he said, according to The Guardian.
EcoWatch Daily Newsletter
Nestlé cannot claim that its Ice Mountain bottled water brand is an essential public service, according to Michigan's second highest court, which delivered a legal blow to the food and beverage giant in a unanimous decision.
A number of supermarkets across the country have voluntarily issued a recall on sushi, salads and spring rolls distributed by Fuji Food Products due to a possible listeria contamination, as CBS News reported.
If you read a lot of news about the climate crisis, you probably have encountered lots of numbers: We can save hundreds of millions of people from poverty by 2050 by limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, but policies currently in place put us on track for a more than three degree increase; sea levels could rise three feet by 2100 if emissions aren't reduced.
Poverty and violence in Central America are major factors driving migration to the United States. But there's another force that's often overlooked: climate change.
Retired Lt. Cmdr. Oliver Leighton Barrett is with the Center for Climate and Security. He says that in Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, crime and poor economic conditions have long led to instability.
"And when you combine that with protracted drought," he says, "it's just a stressor that makes everything worse."
Barrett says that with crops failing, many people have fled their homes.
"These folks are leaving not because they're opportunists," he says, "but because they are in survival mode. You have people that are legitimate refugees."
So Barrett supports allocating foreign aid to programs that help people in drought-ridden areas adapt to climate change.
"There are nonprofits that are operating in those countries that have great ideas in terms of teaching farmers to use the land better, to harvest water better, to use different variety of crops that are more resilient to drought conditions," he says. "Those are the kinds of programs I think are needed."
So he says the best way to reduce the number of climate change migrants is to help people thrive in their home countries.
Reporting credit: Deborah Jian Lee / ChavoBart Digital Media.
Reposted with permission from Yale Climate Connections.
- Trump Admin Ignored Its Own Data Linking Migrant Crisis to Climate ... ›
- How Climate Change Is Driving Emigration From Central America ... ›
Trending
Chris Pratt was called out on social media by Game of Thrones star Jason Momoa after Pratt posted an image "low key flexing" with a single-use plastic water bottle.