In search of "sustainable cashmere"

Questions on cashmere

Nobody would ever accuse me of being a fashionista, nor can I make any claim to be an ecological expert, but our work in Mongolia has brought us directly into some of the paradoxes that swirl around "sustainable fashion” and especially the link between fashion and the environment. 

We always knew that the impact of cashmere chains on the Mongolian landscape was a big influence on rangeland health (and not just cashmere) but exactly how that played out and exactly how we could rethink it wasn't immediately obvious.

Three big questions continue to bother us:

• if cashmere is a luxury material why are cashmere herders so strapped for cash?

• despite years of sustainability initiatives the rangeland continues to degrade - why?

• every fashion brand seems genuinely keen to influence nature uplift - but to date no model has emerged that seems truly effective - why?

This last one especially I have come to experience more closely as we extend our focus up from the landscapes into value chains. There is a tendency in our world for blaming others - 'the brands don't really care', 'herders can't be trusted to do the right thing', 'the middle men players are all on the take' etc etc. 

It's not my experience. Instead I sense an growing uneasy frustration that simple solutions don't seem to be effective. I'm pretty sure everyone we work with would love to find effective ways to organise supply chains to support regenerating landscapes - but to date that formula has proved elusive. 

After a spring/summer of 2025 where we experimented with different ways of buying cashmere (painful, learned a lot) I think we can offer some insight on the gap and what we need to do to close it. 

Start in the landscapes

Here's a question for the brand folks: 

if you want to improve environmental health should you start with the landscape or start with a material in a supply chain?

The answer seems obvious - start in the landscape. But prevailing "sustainability" practice has started at the other end, with the material and the chain in an attempt to answer something like "how can we reduce the impact of the cashmere we buy?”

So we're coming at it from the ground up - starting in the landscape and then looking at the supply chains through a landscape lens, rather than look at landscapes through a material lens. It's a completely different perspective and it gives us a lot of clues on what needs to be shifted. 

Producers to Stewards

The goats command all the attention

In common with farming systems around the world the herders in our rangeland areas are often referred to as "producers". They're defined by producing raw cashmere. This is a challenge given that the whole landscape they occupy (for example Erdenet Mal Sureg in Bayankhonghor) is big (51,000 hectares) and full of a variety of natural zones including water points and forests. 

Spending time observing the herders one thing is clear. Their lives are dominated by livestock - especially the cashmere goats - to the extent that there is no time for anything else: not much time for the camels, even less for the yaks, and for the vast area of landscape outside of where the livestock roam, no time at all. 

The Saxaul Forest commands no attention

Herders can't be Stewards right now because, through necessity, they are livestock centric, not landscape centric. This isn't a choice - it's an economic trap. They've become financially dependent on cashmere, needing volume to cover their expenses. It consumes all their focus and time.They don't have the time, the resources or the economic incentive to be Stewards. (There will be a lot more on this transition in future posts - including an approach to monitoring that looks very promising and scalable).

So our regenerative supply system has to help them embrace stewardship, by helping to align the economics to nature uplift, and above all helping to create a value system which is founded on regeneration not extraction.

Adaptation to climate change

The theme you see here about diversified income streams is part of a bigger picture where rural livelihoods are increasingly exposed to uncertainty, mainly driven by climate. There is some soft evidence that overall livestock numbers may have peaked and are headed downwards. A renewed focus on cashmere quality as opposed to simply volume is in the air. And the urgent need to instil adaptability into the daily lives of the herders is apparent.

A system that rests on fragile dependencies - such as the current cashmere chain - can't sustain in the long run. It's a great time to test out a new nature friendly approach.

Towards a ground up design for sustainable cashmere (and other value streams)

Earlier in 2025, we conducted a pioneering experiment with the support of a French luxury fashion house, Nativa, herder communities, and co-operatives in Jinst and South Gobi. Our goal was to see how end brands, which usually don't deal with raw cashmere, could change the supply chain dynamics to support better landscape management. Specifically, we aimed to control livestock numbers to match the land's carrying capacity. 

The details of what went on and what we learned are topics for another day - but trying to do something new through the existing chain was unbelievably difficult but at the same time so usefully instructive. 

So why don't we have sustainable cashmere yet?

The headline is that there is a gap between today's supply chains and effective landscape regeneration that cannot be bridged. This is fundamental because it means that all attempts to drive sustainability through the existing supply system cannot influence outcomes in the landscapes. It is the reason why brands can't exert the influence they want - the system won't let them. 

The three big issues any "sustainable" supply system must address:

• rangeland degradation in Mongolia is driven primarily by overgrazing, exacerbated by climate change. The effects and intensity varies by area but overall there are 65m-70m livestock heads against a resilient carrying capacity closer to 20-25m

• herder income dependency (and cash dependency) on cashmere puts them in a powerless position when it comes to selling

• the selling organisations in the chain are not landscape management organisations - they can't influence landscape outcomes directly (and in most cases can't do it indirectly). The counterpoint is also true - the landscape management organisations (mostly known as pasture user groups (PUGs)) aren’t selling organisations. There’s no direct connection between cashmere purchasing and landscape management

  
  

Any supply system that doesn't regulate around livestock numbers and carrying capacity, that doesn't diversify and smooth out herder income, that isn't connected to landscape management will not deliver environmental outcomes. 

Joining the dots - why the chain drives degradation

There's a lot more detail behind each of these themes but for now it's important to draw the connection between the as-is cashmere chain and rangeland degradation.

• The numbers of livestock keep going up (not just cashmere goats, all livestock). More pressure is put on grazing areas. Less grass. So less capacity to support the animals. 

• Cashmere, despite being a luxury product, is sold by weight. It doesn't matter if the cashmere is from an area where the land is well managed, the price is a per KG price. The more KGs the better income for the herder. More goats = more KGs = more $.

• Herders have no pricing power. They get paid only once a year for cashmere (a big chunk of their income) and (often) have taken out loans to cover expenses*. Those loans are collateralised against livestock (more goats, more loans) and fall due at exactly the time when the goats are combed. By then herders need cash. Urgently. 

• But the chain doesn't need the cashmere urgently. 2025 cashmere might not show up in a product line up until late 2027. Nobody upward from the herder is in any kind of hurry. So they can play hardball on pricing. 

• Herders sell either individually to agents or collectively through co-operatives. Co-operatives help members gain bargaining power and offer buyers quality assurance through certification schemes.

• Co-operatives are not landscape management organisations. The members of a co-op can come from far and wide, and even in cases (still rare) where co-ops insist that all co-op members are also members of a pasture user group (defined grazing territory) they mean that 100% of the co-op members belong to "a" pasture user group, not that 100% of the members of a pasture user group belong to the co-op.

This really matters for regeneration and environmental sustainability. In the current arrangement "sustainability" standards are applied either to individual herders (not a landscape management organisation) or a co-operative (not a landscape management organisation). Neither is capable of delivering nature uplift. 

Chains don't work for sustainable landscapes

The chain not only doesn't work for nature, it also doesn't work for efficiency. At every node there are dependencies on single buyers that have specific criteria. Product that doesn't meet those criteria are rejected (too thick, wrong colour, too much dust) meaning herders then have to look for secondary markets to sell the remainder. 

And that's just for the cashmere. The sheep, the camels and the yaks don't get a mention until after the cashmere is completed and by then for the most part it's uneconomical to do too much with the fibre. So at every stage value opportunities are missed. 

The chain for cashmere, and almost every other material, is designed for optimized selectivity. It does not prioritize landscape health. "Get us 5 tons of 15.5 micron white cashmere" is an extractive, unnatural order. It might lead to beautiful product but it leaves the brown, the grey, the 16.5, the 17.5, the sheep, the camels and all the other stuff essential for ecosystem health back in the landscapes generating little to no income. For every KG of lovely white 15.5micron there are many, many KGs of other materials that either take a long and arduous route to find a buyer or end up as waste.  

This can be fixed

Single commodity product chains that create artificial dependency on single buyers at every node cannot be sustainable. No amount of sustainability programs within the existing system can bridge the fundamental gap between the chain and the landscape. 

But a redesigned system could. 

The characteristics are clear. Landscape driven, landscape management organisations as the origin seller. Cash upfront with supply chain finance at the herder end. Networks of buyers not networks of sellers - especially multi-product networks. Multiple value streams - cashmere, sheep, meat. And value aligned to quality not just of product but of land management. More money from less pressure on the landscape and supply systems (not chains) that are optimised for nature restoration and rangeland management. 

Best of all the end brands would have to do very little differently other than agree to be in a coalition system focused on long term relationships with landscapes and communities.

The good news - most of the parts already exist in some form

Work to foster stewardship in landscape based organisations is an increasing area of focus across Mongolia. Not just with Good Growth, there are several organisations working hard directly with communities plus an ever growing ecosystem of support and intelligence: photo-monitoring, public census, more focus on pasture user groups (PUGs) and more.

The missing piece is how to plug these landscape organisations into the supply system in a way that works for the brands and for nature.

Kerkulan - a pilot of a nature friendly supply system

The route to sustainable cashmere starts with sustainable landscapes. There is no sustainable cashmere without sustainable land management. That is the non-negotiable foundation of any system and one we pour a lot of effort into along with our supporters and funders. (More on what’s new in landscapes soon)

But it continues with a sustainable supply system that serves multiple buyers working in concert. 

If the current system is characterised by clubs of sellers with limited connection to landscape management, and dependency on single buyers leading to wasted value, then the regenerative system is characterised by clubs of buyers with strong connections to landscape management in a system that captures and optimises all the value opportunities. 

We call it Kerkulan. The plan is to pilot it in 2026 and to showcase it at the COP in August 2026. 

If you're interested in playing get in touch. 

*this is a generalisation. Not all herders are the same. In some places there is a wide spectrum of herders with a couple of mega herders who might have a lot of animas and a lot of money, whilst the others have many fewer animals and much less money. Mega herds might be good for income but they're bad news for Nature.