Textile Insight

T he Climate Crisis—created by the continuing release of carbon into the atmosphere—has been called out by the most recent annual United Nations international climate meetings, COP 26 and 27. e crisis is creating global warming, resulting in dynamic weather activity from forest fires and droughts to powerful storms with torrential rain, heavy snow or outsized hail. Carbon is an element in our planet, and is released as a by-product of burning fossil fuels, decomposition of organic matter, and other mechanisms. We cannot eliminate it, but we can control its release into the atmosphere, where it links with oxygen to form greenhouse gases (GHGs) such as carbon dioxide (CO2), or with hydrogen to form methane (CH4). Carbon emissions have risen steadily over the last 25 years. In 1996 the Paris Climate Agreement set emissions limits intended to stop the forecasted 1.5˚ C rise in global temperature and stabilize the climate. Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth was released in 2006. However, rather than taking immediate action to decrease the carbon being released, it has been le to the last minute, as if a miracle solution was to be invented to solve the crisis. Current predictions are that the 1.5˚ C rise will happen before 2050, and by the turn of the century it will be more than double. Sea levels will rise, crops will fail, the THE JOURNEY TO CARBON NEUTRALITY PART 3 April 2023 ~ Textile Insight Functional Fabric Fair Special Edition • 5 textileinsight.com Part 1 / Spring 2023 introduced the Focus Topic of carbon footprinting fabric samples and their measurement technologies. Part 2 / Autumn 2023 concentrated on the first results from the suppliers. Part 3 / Spring 2023 is a push to encourage the use of similar metrics to enable realistic comparisons among the fabrics exhibited. F O C U S TO P I C

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