Taking the Fur Issue to the United Nations

This is the seventh entry in ACTAsia’s 20 Years, 20 Wins series, marking 20 milestones from two decades of work.  This instalment is about ACTAsia becoming the first organisation to bring the fur issue to the United Nations. #7 of 20

Header image: Silver Fox, Poland fur farm. Andrew Skowron / We Animals

In 2021, ACTAsia’s Fur Free Project  – an attempt to end the fur trade through consumer education, industry engagement and public campaigning – was recognised by the United Nations and the organisation was invited to join the UN Fashion and Lifestyle Network.
The Fur Free Project is ACTAsia’s answer to the fur trade: a mix of consumer education, industry pledges and public campaigning aimed at making fur farming obsolete. 

With Fur Free, ACTAsia became the first organisation to successfully put the fur issue in front of the UN under the Responsible Consumption goal, one of the seventeen Sustainable Development Goals that frame how the UN thinks about the future of the planet.

This is no small win. The question of fur has historically been treated as a niche animal welfare argument, or at best a fashion controversy. It was something for designers and campaigners to battle out on runways and in boycotts. Recognising fur as a Responsible Consumption issue at a global scale changes the register entirely.

It insists that the fur trade isn’t simply a matter of taste or ethics, but a question of what the world consumes and at what cost. Fur now sits alongside food waste, fast fashion and single-use plastics as things the international community has agreed we need to rethink.

A One Health Issue 

Fur Free sits squarely inside the concept of One Health: the idea that animal, environmental and human health are one connected system. The Fur Free Project’s UN-recognition – bringing the fur issue onto the global agenda – is testament to the fact that fur farming is so much more than a matter of animal welfare. It is a major public health risk and an environmental one too, impacting lives and ecosystems well beyond the industry itself. 

Fur farms are a textbook case of why the One Health framework exists.
In 2020, Denmark found mink on fur farms acting as an intermediate host for a mutated strain of COVID-19, passing back into humans in a new form, and ordered a nationwide cull. Mink that had escaped fur farms elsewhere in Europe were separately found to be damaging local ecosystems as an invasive species.

Different failures, same underlying truth: fur farming was never just an animal welfare issue. ACTAsia was already making that case when the Fur Free Project reached the UN in 2021, years ahead of the wider world.

White mink in barren wire cages, Poland. Andrew Skowron / We Animals

Change from Within, Not from Outside 

What makes this win matter isn’t just that ACTAsia reached the UN, but how. 
One Health started as a scientific framework, mostly to discuss among researchers and public health experts.

Getting fur recognised under an SDG is part of how that framework moves from theory into policy, built into the very goals that shape how governments and institutions measure progress. That is institutional mainstreaming: an idea stops being argued from the outside and starts being built into the system. 


Much animal welfare campaigning takes place outside of institutions with protests, petitions, and public pressure targeting the attention of decision-makers. With the Fur Free Project, ACTAsia has made it inside the institution. We are part of how it defines the very problem.

Being folded into the UN Conscious Fashion and Lifestyle Network and having fur formally recognised under an SDG means that the issue hasn’t just been raised and heard, but it counts, formally. 

This win and its symbolism is consistent with how ACTAsia functions more broadly: building projects that outlast a single campaign and mainstreaming our compassionate agenda. 

Where We Go Next

Getting fur recognised as a UN issue is a milestone at the beginning of the fur-free journey. In the years since, ACTAsia has built on this seat at the table: an academic fur-free fashion course, more than a hundred brands signing on to go fur-free in China, a decade of fashion shows putting the issue onto some of the world’s biggest stages.

Visit ACTAsia’s Fur Free page to see where this work is heading next and consider signing the Fur Free Pledge.

If you would like to support the research and programmes behind fur free, learn how you can get involved and consider donating today. 

Donate