Sustainability Concerns in Media: ‘Most Definitely Real’

In particular, one sustainability panel featuring Barbara Lange, CEO of Kibo121 and previous Executive Director at SMPTE, Dom Robinson, Co-Founder, .
Concerns around how to create sustainable workflows in media, the question of where media fits into the global emissions picture and how to identify and respond to key drivers for change were central themes at IBC2022.
In particular, one sustainability panel featuring Barbara Lange, CEO of Kibo121 and previous Executive Director at SMPTE, Dom Robinson, Co-Founder, Director and Creative Firestarter of id3as, Khandiz Joni, Creative Sustainableist at Creative Zero and Kristan Bullett, CEO of Humans Not Robots, set out to provide some answers.
The four speakers set out to raise awareness on the complex issues and responsibilities that the media industry must face up to. They pinpointed the lack of clear and consistent measurements currently in place and the need for education on energy consumption in all aspects of media, from production to distribution, and how navigating through the complexities can offer cost effectiveness and business opportunities.
Defining Sustainability
Lange opened the discussion, concerned about how many organisations have no idea where to start with sustainability in media, and to answer the questions is it real? she confirms, “It is most definitely real.”
She gave a shout out to projects that are already looking at how productions can reduce their carbon footprint in the content creation phase, such as the Albert programme and the Green Production Guide, both of which offer organisations techniques to reduce their carbon footprint.
She delved into the production workflow, from content creation to content manipulation and distribution, and pointed out that the biggest current challenge in implementing sustainable practices is that there are no standards of measurement and a lack of mandates, while some companies may even see implying a sustainability method as an added expense.
“Sustainability means recognising that ending poverty and other deprivations go hand in hand with strategies that improve health and education, reduce inequality and spur economic growth, all while tackling climate change and environmental issues. Therefore, sustainability encompasses such Corporate Responsibility issues as diversity, equity and inclusion, as well as social justice issues”, said Lange.
Joni emphasised the importance of defining sustainability via a human-centric approach - the intersection between people and planet: “Sustainability is about a stable resilient state of being and how do we get there? When we take the humanity out of this conversation, we are not going to drive the empathetic change we need to see in achieving this resilient state.”
Blurred lines and gap-filling
Dom Robinson spoke of energy consumption awareness in broadcasting vs. streaming: “In certain parts of broadcast and certainly in things like data centres, telco ISP, there’s been a lot of [sustainability] thinking for a long time. But given that streaming is typically talked about as being 70% of network traffic these days, and we have a top line figure that ICT is burning 3% of all the world’s energy.What I felt was [in] my industry, because we don’t know, we haven’t got that finger on the pulse yet and we’re not ready to be transparent about things. We haven’t worked out how to measure. [Energy consumption is] an afterthought.”
Robinson added: “There was a lot of thinking that there’s a linear relationship between bandwidth and energy. So if you reduce bandwidth, you’re supposed to reduce energy. It doesn’t really work like that. We don’t quite know how it does work, because we are yet to go and measure it.There’s no common framework of language.”
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Joni also recognised the lack of clarity surrounding sustainability in the industry: “You sort of cherry pick where we’re going to use it so we can have an emissions reduction, and we’ll give...