November 2025 release notes for brands, retailers and manufacturers

Highlights from the November 2025 release

• The Higg FEM 2025 is live on November 6
• The new Worldly Collaboration Suite replaces the Adoption tool, so brands can boost supplier participation and deliver more complete data
• The Worldly Assistant, an AI-powered conversational chatbot, is live and can provide immediate in-platform answers to facilities completing their Higg FEM assessment. 
• The Higg MSI version 3.11 is now live, with updates including new mineral-based materials category (e.g., stoneware, porcelain), expanded cotton and leather data, and methodological updates to nylon, PET, and other background datasets.

Full release notes

Assessments & Adoption

The Higg Facility Environmental Module (FEM) 2025

The annual update to the Higg FEM launches on Worldly on November 6th, 2025 and is available for all facility accounts. 

Changes to this year's module includes: 

• A new facility type that reports Finished Product Processing in pieces/pairs for facilities who do one or more of the following production processes: Product Printing, Product Painting, Embroidery & Embellishments, Buffing & Polishing, Moulding, etc.

• Improved emission factors for district heating, chilled water, biomass

• Updated grid emissions factors based on the IEA Annual update, as is best practice for Scope 2 emissions calculations

• April 30, 2026 is now the recommended (no longer required) posting deadline, and facilities are able to unpost their assessment for 60 days following their initial posting

Please note: The Worldly Assistant complements our existing customer support channels and support.worldly.io by offering an additional way to get help and guidance on completing your assessment. These existing resources remain available to all customers and FEM users.

Worldly Collaboration Suite

Worldly's next generation of supplier engagement is ready just in time for the start of the new Higg FEM cadence. Segment suppliers, coordinate outreach, and track completion in real time, all backed by the industry’s most experienced customer success team.

• Unified Supplier Management - supplier engagement was previously tied to individual assessments. With the Worldly Collaboration Suite, brands and retailers will have a unified view of facilities and can engage with them holistically across assessments. 

• Segments - create, configure and name a custom filter based on defined facility attributes. Segments can automatically updated as facilities meet, or no longer meet, a filter criteria. Or segments can contain a fixed list of facilities that met the filter criteria at a point in time.

• Campaigns - build automated, recurring, and targeted emails to facility segments in a network. Campaigns can also be used to view historical FEM, FDM and FSLM completion statuses.

• Supplier Profiles - review the data collection history of individual facilities across FEM, FDM and FSLM through a single, account-level vantage point.

Facility Data Manager (FDM)

The FDM Modules API now includes production volume allocations linked to your account.

• View the production allocation and MJ impact for your brand in each FDM submission.

• Allocation data is brand-specific and proprietary—your portion will never be visible to other brands.

Insights & Actionability 

Insights Hub

The new Social Baseline Dashboard provides an aggregate view of social risk across all facilities. This dashboard helps compliance teams quickly identify, triage, and act on high-risk areas, based on the Higg Index Facility Social & Labor Module (FSLM) from Cascale.

With the new dashboard, you can:

• Filter and Hotspot Summary – Drill down by theme, region, and severity to understand where the most pressing risks lie.

• Red Flag Trends & Benchmarking – Track trends over time and benchmark your facilities’ performance against peers.

• Key Metrics at a Glance – View total zero-tolerance and legal compliance flags, all in one place.

• Hotspot Visualizations – Identify the regions where there are the most risk flags, supporting targeted interventions.

The new Social Baseline dashboard in the Insights Hub

Worldly Axion

Scenario planning Model future energy and carbon outcomes
With Worldly Axion Scenarios, you can now explore how energy improvements and initiatives will impact your carbon and energy performance.

• Model how changes affect carbon intensity, total emissions, and total energy use.

• Test different interventions by region, facility type, or individual facility.

• Get carbon cost projections based on Network for Greening the Financial System (NGFS) scenarios or your company’s shadow carbon price.

Scenario planning in Worldly Axion

Product Impacts

Twice a year, Worldly collaborates with Cascale to update the Higg Materials Sustainability Index (Higg MSI), the industry's most widely used standardized framework for measuring material impacts. The latest update (Higg MSI v3.11) occurred on October 17 and is documented in the Higg MSI change log, where you can review all new and updated materials, trims, and processes.

Higg MSI v3.11 highlights:

• New "mineral-based" material category: Raw material options that are especially relevant to the home furnishings sector, including stoneware, natural stone, glass ceramic, porcelain and container glass
• Expanded data for cotton and leather: Five new primary cotton fiber datasets and four new leather materials

• Methodological updates to nylon, PET, and other background datasets.

   

Additionally, all midpoints and scores were changed to align with the updated LCA for Experts (formerly GaBi) database. Because background datasets such as raw materials and energy were updated, score changes of around ±10% can be expected.