Global Green Media Network
The global screen media industry, with its vast cultural influence and economic power, has become a key player in environmental awareness. In recent years, environmental themes such as climate change and species extinction have gained prominence in screen media, with sustainability becoming central to industry branding and marketing.
However, the industry faces a significant and often overlooked challenge: its own environmental and social footprint, which demands urgent scrutiny.
Bridging perspectives from film and media scholarship, environmental studies, social sciences, and political economy, the Global Green Media Network (GGMN) facilitates collaborations between industry, academia, and policymakers for rethinking a sustainable future for screen culture.
The GGMN explores the connection between environmentally sound media practices, local cultural values, media industry dynamics, economic policies, and climate change challenges. We aim to encourage transparency, raise awareness and explore potential solutions – and to encourage media professionals, academics, environmentalists, activists, and reporters to join in the dialogue to rethink the industry’s environmental responsibilities.
Green Screens: Sustainability in Europe’s Screen Industries
Dr. Kate Moffat
A quiet but consequential shift is underway in European filmmaking. Environmental considerations—once seen as optional, expensive, or symbolic— are increasingly being built into the operational frameworks of production. This evolution is being shaped by a combination of environmental urgency, public funding requirements, and emerging policy design. Yet despite clear momentum, widespread adoption is still emerging, and the available data, while robust in certain regions, remain uneven across the continent.
This report examines Europe’s leading sustainability programmes through a verified, data-led lens. What the evidence reveals is not a uniform transition but the rise of two complementary models of change:
A top-down regulatory approach centred in the DACH region, where compliance is built into funding conditions and professional standards.
A bottom-up, data-first movement led most notably by France, where more than 10,000 carbon assessments have now been completed, producing the world’s largest dataset on audiovisual production emissions.
Greening European Film Policy: Towards a Sustainable European Film and TV Industry
This report examines sustainability policy and practice in the European film, television, and streaming industry at local, state, and EU levels. It explores policy support for institutionalizing these practices and offers solutions to fill policy gaps. Connecting policy and practice, the report aims to make green film production an active agent for positive change.
Addressing funding, production, and reportage phases, the report provides three key recommendations:
1. Minimum Standards
Establish standardized sustainability expectations and norms, from development stage planning to on-set baselines, for both publicly-financed and commercial productions.
2. Finance
Adopt mandatory financial investment schemes for all productions, including incoming mobile productions and international co-productions, to link financial incentives with verifiable reductions in environmental impact.
3. Auditing
Introduce third-party auditing and certification focused on exceeding minimum standards, directly tied to financial incentivization.
Sustainable Digitalization: Ensuring a sustainable digital future for UK film and television
A new report by the Minderoo Centre for Technology and Democracy, authored by Hunter Vaughan and Pietari Kääpä, examines sustainable digital practices in the UK film and television industry. It highlights the environmental impacts of digitalization and calls for frameworks and policies to promote eco-friendly practices and encourage positive industry change.
Digitalization and Sustainability
The report examines the impact of digitalization on the industry’s environmental footprint and social practices.
Government and Industry Levers
Identifies mechanisms for positive change and recommends policy actions for sustainable digital practices.
Environmental Impact
Highlights the significant carbon footprint and waste production in film and TV production, stressing the need for robust sustainability strategies.
Benefits and Challenges of Digitalization
Discusses the efficiencies brought by digital technologies and the difficulty in scrutinizing their environmental impact.