All Better Cotton Initiative (BCI) producers must adopt its updated regenerative standard and complete certification by the end of 2027, under a transition the cotton standards body opened to brand-level sourcing targets on 1 April. The programme reached 1.4 million farmers and more than 250 brands last season, making it one of the largest vehicles for shifting cotton practice at field level.

BCI has revised the field-level Principles and Criteria and built a new Evidence Framework reporting on nine areas: crop protection, soil health, water stewardship, fibre quality, smallholder livelihoods, climate change, biodiversity, women's empowerment and decent work. Farmers must commit to a continuous improvement plan covering three regenerative practices.

"Sustainability is now the floor, and we're thinking of regenerative as the ambition," said Eva Benavidez Clayton, senior director of demand and engagement at BCI. "Many regenerative practices faded during the Green Revolution, but reviving them may be our best shot at reversing decades of degradation."

What changes for sourcing teams?

From April 1, brands and retailers can set regenerative sourcing targets through BCI ahead of full implementation. Once certification completes by end-2027, members can claim regenerative cotton sourcing and fold BCI field data into their own sustainability reporting.

The commercial logic sits upstream of the factory. "Your footprint doesn't start in the factory; it starts in the soil," Benavidez Clayton said. Much of a cotton garment's environmental impact is decided before the fibre leaves the farm, across water use, biodiversity, pesticides and synthetic fertiliser. She added that farmers face adaptation pressure this season, not on a 2030 timeline, given droughts, floods and extreme heat. The takeaway: fibre-level standards now set the baseline for what brands can credibly report downstream.

How will the claims be traced?

BCI frames traceability as the condition for substantiating any regenerative claim. "Without traceability, regenerative is just a nice word on a hang tag," Benavidez Clayton said. The body launched country-of-origin traceability in 2023 and targets farm-level traceability within two years, by 2028.

• Large farms: fibre traced directly back to the individual farm.
• Smallholders: traced to a producer unit, a grouping of farmers using the same practices in the same climate.

Benavidez Clayton argued BCI's position between growers and buyers makes the system workable: no other body connects this many farmers to this many brands. She cautioned that practices must stay locally relevant, noting methods in Pakistan, Brazil and Côte d'Ivoire will differ. Traceable, fibre-forward regenerative cotton is the end state the framework is built to support.

Who pays for the transition?

BCI places the economics of adoption at the centre of the programme. "You can't regenerate soil on a farm that can't pay its bills," Benavidez Clayton said. Practice changes cost time and money, and yields can dip in early years; if farmers carry that cost alone, adoption stalls or quietly reverses.

She was direct on cost distribution: every time the sector raises the bar, someone pays, and too often it is the farmer. The standard therefore treats decent work, women's empowerment and smallholder livelihoods as compliance-relevant reporting areas, not add-ons. Her condition: continuous improvement cannot mean moving the goalposts on the people least able to chase them.

What should buyers do now?

Benavidez Clayton called on retailers and brands to commit to sourcing a defined percentage of their cotton regeneratively through BCI. Visible demand, she argued, signals to farmers that customers will pay for the extra work, creating a cycle that expands regenerative acreage.

First-year goals for the campaign:

• Build awareness among BCI members and stakeholders.
• Secure brand commitments to regenerative sourcing targets.
• Publish field-level data and producer stories evidencing practice change.

Success, in her definition, arrives when regenerative stops being a campaign and becomes how the industry sources cotton. For sourcing heads, the immediate decision is whether to set a 2027-aligned regenerative cotton target now or wait for the certified supply to tighten claim options later.