The EU’s worst wildfire year on record and a summer of record-low rivers have hit the districts where Europe makes its wool, leather, and cotton.
Covilhã sits on the western flank of Portugal’s Serra da Estrela, where the water comes down off the mountain cold and soft, which is the kind of water wool likes. The town has been finishing cloth on that slope for centuries, and it still does. Paulo de Oliveira, founded in 1936, spins, weaves, dyes, and finishes there, and describes itself as the largest producer of wool fabrics on the Iberian Peninsula. On Aug. 13, 2025, a fire began in the municipality of Arganil and burned for 11 days, moving across five districts and roughly 57,000 hectares before it was contained, reaching Covilhã, Unhais da Serra, and Cortes do Meio.
No brand sourcing wool fabric in Portugal could have said, in the week that fire was running, which of its suppliers sat inside the perimeter and which sat outside it. The information required to answer that question is public, sitting in two places that have never been laid on top of each other.
Europe’s hazard data is unusually good. The European Forest Fire Information System recorded 1,079,538 hectares burned across the EU in 2025, the highest total in its records and nearly double the 2006–2024 average, across 7,783 mapped fires in 25 of 27 member states. Portugal and Spain accounted for 460,585 hectares of that in August alone, 43 percent of the EU total, driven by 22 very large fires that ignited almost simultaneously during a three-week heat wave. The 2026 season is running ahead of it. By Aug. 5, 505,683 hectares had burned, against 379,392 hectares by the same date in 2025. Half of EU and UK territory spent July under some level of drought, with 9 percent at alert — the most severe classification. The Loire, Po, Rhine, and Danube all reached record lows in August.
Fashion’s climate exposure research stops at Asia
The most rigorous work on what climate breakdown does to apparel manufacturing has been done, almost entirely, somewhere else. Cornell University’s Global Labor Institute and Schroders 2023 Higher Ground? looks at 32 production hubs and four focus countries — Bangladesh, Cambodia, Pakistan, and Vietnam — geocoding more than 8,000 factories against wet-bulb globe temperature projections and flood models. It found those four countries risk losing $65.89 billion in export earnings by 2030 under a non-adaptive scenario, and 8.64 million jobs by 2050. The Social & Labor Convergence Program’s factory-level data runs along the same axis.
“By clarifying the industry’s exposure to climate risks, our work with Schroders is a wake-up call for manufacturers, brands, investors and apparel-exporting country governments to treat heat and flood events as health and economic hazards that need urgent attention,” Sarosh Kuruvilla, academic director of the Global Labor Institute, told the Cornell Chronicle.
“Investors must begin to engage with apparel companies and their stakeholders to ensure they start to measure and address the significant challenges of physical climate impacts on workers and business models,” Angus Bauer, head of sustainable investment research at Schroders, said in the same announcement. That clarity has never been extended to the European tier of the same supply chain, which is where luxury and much of premium mid-market production actually happens, and which is now burning and drying at rates no comparable analysis has been applied to.
What sits in the exposed districts
Italy’s tanning industry is concentrated to a degree that makes geography a material risk. Its 877 companies turn over more than €4 billion, employ over 17,000 people, and account for 65 percent of European Union leather production and 27 percent of global production value. Half of that national output comes from one district, Arzignano and the Chiampo valley in Vicenza, which sits in the Po plain and specializes in the medium and large bovine hides that go to furniture, automotive, and footwear. Santa Croce sull’Arno in Tuscany, which supplies the luxury houses with smaller hides and sole leather, accounts for a further 35 percent of national turnover. Tanning is among the most water-intensive processes in the chain, and the Po reached record low flow this month.
Greek cotton is more concentrated still. Greece grows more than 80 percent of European cotton on about 210,000 hectares, with the crop clustered in Thessaly, Central Macedonia, Thrace, and Sterea Ellada. Turkey buys 39 percent of Greek cotton exports and Egypt another 33 percent, which puts Greek fiber into the Turkish spinning and weaving sector that supplies a large share of European fast fashion. When Storm Daniel came ashore in September 2023, synthetic-aperture radar mapping found that more than 282 square kilometers of flooded cotton amounted to roughly 30 percent of central Greece’s cotton cultivation, part of 820 square kilometers of agricultural land inundated. The USDA’s most recent Greek cotton forecast cites tighter irrigation water availability as a factor pressing on the 2025/26 crop.
Portugal’s wool cluster around Covilhã and Castelo Branco, Biella’s fine-yarn mills in Piedmont, the Ave valley finishing plants of northern Portugal, and Prato’s recycled-wool operations in Tuscany are each small, dense, place-bound clusters of the sort that cannot be relocated in a season, and each sits in a hazard band that EFFIS and the World Resources Institute’s Aqueduct water risk tools already characterize in detail.
The disclosure is uneven, and that is the obstacle
Building the map requires knowing where the facilities are, and here the brands diverge sharply.
H&M Group publishes the most complete European disclosure of the four groups Ethos examined. Its public supplier list covers more than 554 commercial product suppliers and over 969 tier 1 factories across Europe, Asia, and North America, representing 99 percent of products sold, and extends to tier 2 fabric suppliers including tanneries, dyeing operations, and printers. “As participants in the Transparency Pledge we share the name, address, product type produced and number of workers employed at the factories,” the company states. PVH Corp. maintains a comparable factory disclosure list.
Inditex discloses considerably less, publishing the number of suppliers it sources from in 12 core countries and giving no information on individual factories, a position that has drawn sustained pressure from its own investors. Ethos found no equivalent facility-level list published by Kering.
The analysis is otherwise straightforward. EFFIS publishes burned-area perimeters. The Copernicus European Drought Observatory publishes basin-level severity. Aqueduct publishes baseline water stress and drought risk scores at catchment scale. Geocoding a published supplier address against those layers is a single afternoon’s work per hundred facilities. What does not exist — not at Cornell, not at Schroders, not in any brand’s climate-related financial disclosure we reviewed — is the finished European dataset: a list of named mills, tanneries, dye houses, and finishing plants ranked by how many times fire or water scarcity has come within a defined radius, and how often the models say it will again.
“In our engagement with Inditex one of the things we ask is if they could disclose a list of their suppliers and the geographical location,” MN, the Dutch asset manager that leads engagement with the company for the Platform Living Wage Financials coalition, told Reuters. “Even though Inditex assures us that they have this data available, up until now Inditex is not willing to disclose this information.”
The ground that burned above Covilhã last August is the slope the water comes down. The 2026 season is still open. Copernicus has activated its emergency mapping service 30 times since the beginning of June, and the Iberian fires that set the 2025 record ignited during a heat wave in the first three weeks of August.
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