While we may hear and read a lot in the news about climate change and how having a warmer world is affecting us, it can be very easy to zone out and overlook the problem – at least until we see something particularly hard-hitting.
Often that can be a documentary about the impact climate change is having on the world, displaying stark effects such as melting glaciers, loss of habitat and increasing forest fires.
However, some may raise a relevant question about such programming; what is the carbon footprint of making it? Sir David Attenborough may talk and broadcast a lot about climate change, but some might wonder just how many air miles he has clocked up while travelling the globe filming wildlife. No doubt he is far more aware of this now than 50 years ago.
Whether your film or programme has a green theme or not, there are many ways you can go about making it more ecologically sustainable. These will naturally vary; a Hollywood film shot on location may be spread across different continents, for instance, whereas other productions may be confined to a local area, creating very different carbon footprints.
However, whenever and wherever you are filming, the equipment itself has its own impact. You will need to generate electricity, especially for outside broadcasts, so hiring a low emission generator could be one of the most obvious easy wins to make your production greener.
This is the kind of device that can help make outside broadcasting a great deal greener than doing it indoors in a studio. Of course, with an indoor location you don’t need to travel (except as individuals getting to the location in the first place), but once there you are at the mercy of the building’s own features.
For instance, the studio may not be very energy efficient, due to a lack of insulation, carbon-intensive heating or a lack of green energy. The building may also lack other modern features that would make it notably eco-friendly, such as grey water use or a green roof.
The film and TV industry is certainly aware of these issues. In 2020, the British Film and Television Association (BAFTA) published a report that set out a roadmap for making the industry net zero by 2050.
Titled A Screen New Deal – a Route Map to Sustainable Film Production, it acknowledged that the measures varied somewhat in scope, including “some that are relatively simple to implement, to bigger, more ambitious ideas that require structural industry-wide shifts to implement successfully”.
Among the key points were the need to use less energy overall, to be more efficient in the energy that is used, to source energy from renewables where possible, to cut the use of non-recycled materials in studio sets, reduce water usage, the use of smart tech to reduce studio carbon footprints and ‘consolidated movement’, which means less travelling.
Hiring a low-emission generator may be just a small part of a wider effort to make broadcasting and film-making greener, but every bit helps and it is vital for an industry that has done so much to publicise the climate crisis to play its own part in tackling it.