Supporting Professionalisation of the Sustainability Department in UK Screen Productions

The global screen industries are increasingly reckoning with the environmental impacts of production. While we often think of screen production in terms of intangible "content", latest data from the BAFTA albert initiative reveal that the average hour of television produced in the UK generates no less than 16.6 tonnes of Co2 – as much as the average UK citizen's carbon emissions over 18 months.(1)

As part of the industry's efforts to shift to more sustainable ways of working, new roles and businesses have emerged that specialise in environmental consultancy for the screen sector. Many productions now incorporate a "sustainability department" that works to collect data on and to mitigate the production's material impacts. This new subsector of the screen industries is growing at a remarkable rate globally, with consultants active across the Anglosphere and EU as well as South Africa, Mexico, Colombia, India, Jordan, Uruguay, Argentina and Kenya. However, these still new and evolving roles yet lack professional standards, frameworks, and broad industry recognition, and practitioners face many obstacles to their working lives and capacity to make a difference.

This report, produced in collaboration with leading UK-based consultant Neptune Sustainability Ltd., presents a first of its kind look at the work, expertise, and challenges of sustainability practitioners in the UK screen industries. It examines the conditions and lived experience of work in the sector and proposes actions for supporting the development of the sector as a vital element in the industries' green transition.

Download the report (pdf)

On the project/methodology

The research carried out in-depth interviews with 11 practitioners working with Neptune Sustainability Ltd. Including in-house employees, freelancers managed by the consultancy on a project basis, and former employees who have since moved on to other roles. All participants have worked on UK-based feature film and high-end television productions for major global streamers, which comprise Neptune's main clients.

Participants were asked about their backgrounds and career trajectories, day to day work, labour conditions, key skills, interactions with production crews and other industry stakeholders, their lived experience of doing sustainability work in the sector, and the challenges they face, and their view of the development needs of their profession.

Key findings

Findings show sustainability roles to be a complex hybrid of production, environmental management, and science communication roles, and point toward the vital importance of creating widely accepted standards and frameworks.

Sustainability roles operate as embedded advocates and ambassadors for the green transition within productions. Practitioners’ perspectives extend beyond the single production toward instilling new values and ways of working that crewmembers carry into their next projects and long-term practice.
Role holders operate as links in the network connecting productions with new organisations (e.g. albert and other carbon calculators), new initiatives and policies, and new vendors and technologies. They work to mediate new values and ways of thinking.
Without an accepted standard for what comprises a “sustainable production”, and without an established competency framework for the sustainability department, roles and jobs are highly variable and it is difficult to establish best practice for impact.
Without mandatory standards and requirements, productions still take any sustainability action on a largely voluntary basis. Practitioners must obtain buy-in from productions and crews for any change or adoption of new practices and technologies. Communication and advocacy skills are just as important for role holders as data and production skills.
There is currently a lack of training provision for practitioners that leaves gaps at all levels and causes difficulty in recruiting workforce: the 2024 Sustainability Coordinators training launched by Media Cymru and the University of South Wales in collaboration with Severn Screen is an important development, but funding and support for further training remains a challenge.
Misconceptions and lack of awareness of sustainability work and roles in the industry remain a serious challenge. Role holders must constantly explain and justify their work, and productions not aware of how to best manage, work with, and utilise sustainability departments.
Negative attitudes and pushback, conflicts with crews, and lack of acknowledgement have a substantial impact on practitioner health and wellbeing and are a problem for worker retention. Lack of established pathways for career progression present a further barrier to workers seeing their future in the field.
A main challenge facing the sector as it continues to develop is siloing: organisations and companies creating their own frameworks, standards, networks and spaces.

Key recommendations

The report recommends the following actions for industry bodies and initiatives, commissioners, and consultancies collaborate on in order to promote the professionalisation of the field and integration of sustainability departments into the industry as a new normal.

Provide a standardised set of guidelines and a competency framework for the structure and function of and the roles within the sustainability department.
Create certification-bearing training for sustainability roles, in the form of regionally specific programmes building on a shared framework of standards for sustainability department roles in the UK.
Promote increased visibility for sustainability departments through creation of industry-facing information campaigns and resources aiming to normalise the inclusion of the department in productions.
Support professional community building through the creation of networking spaces and opportunities. Consultancies should consider forming a professional association to set standards, disseminate expertise, and advance professional interests.
Support CV building through standardised screen credits and guaranteeing practitioners access to production data showcasing their work.

The launch event/future trajectories

The report was launched in a hybrid event in the Jubilee Hotel and Conference Centre and online on October 3^rd, 2024. The event featured a presentation of highlights from the report, followed by a Q&A session and a roundtable discussion of future trajectories for the British Academy-funded Eco-Practitioners in the Audiovisual Content Industries project. The event was attended by 32 participants from a range of key industry stakeholders including delegates from the BFI, BAFTA albert, Creative England and ScreenSkills, as well as US-based from NBCUniversal and Sony Pictures.

Pictured: Louise Marie Smith (Manager, Neptune Sustainability Ltd), Laurence Johnson (Sustainability Manager, Film London), Louise Dixey (Sustainability Manager, Ffilm Cymru), Siobahn Pridgeon (Head of Operations & Programme Delivery, BAFTA albert), with project lead Dr. Leora Hadas.

Sources

(1) BAFTA albert Annual Review 2023