The CBC has provided the first snapshot of the Canadian screen industry’s carbon footprint, reporting more than 9,500 tonnes of CO2 emissions from 64 original productions since January 2022.

“That is just a sliver of productions. If you extrapolate that to the number of productions in the whole country, the impact is huge,” CBC’s Lisa Clarkson, executive director, business and rights and production sustainability, tells Playback Daily.

The data was revealed in the Preliminary Industry Report on Production Carbon Emissions released on Tuesday (Nov. 7), with the pubcaster dubbing it the biggest report of its kind to date.

The report is based on carbon footprint data submitted by 64 CBC original English-language indie and in-house productions. Starting January 2022, CBC required all original Canadian English-language productions with a budget of more than $400,000 to use the albert calculator to submit a carbon footprint report. CBC has removed that budget threshold as of the beginning of 2023, and all indie and in-house productions are now required to complete a carbon footprint report. The measure is part of CBC’s five-year action plan called Greening Our Story, which launched in June 2021.

The carbon footprint of those 64 productions, across genres and production methods, was the equivalent to the energy use of 2,227 homes for one year, or the consumption of 81 barrels of oil, according to the report.

Travel and transport were responsible for more than 42%, or more 4,000 tonnes, of CO2 emissions. That figure is equivalent to the electricity usage of 952 homes for one year.

Filming spaces and material usage contributed more than 22% and 21%, respectively. Dramas contributed to the majority of emissions followed by comedies and children’s content.

The average drama contributed nearly 75 tonnes of CO2 emissions per hour, while comedies created more than 50 tonnes per hour, said the report. Children’s content was responsible for nearly 25 tonnes per hour, while factual, news and sports were the lowest producers of carbon emissions.

The data was generated using carbon footprint reports that were marked as completed, submitted for audit or with amendments required in albert as of Sept. 8. The data was used for the purpose of having a large pool of information, said the report.

Data on major contributing factors to emissions was consistent to findings in the U.K. and U.S., but this was a “critical” step in getting a sense of where the Canadian film and TV industry stands, says Clarkson.

“If you don’t have Canadian data, you really are just guessing,” she says, noting that the report is the first step in efforts to build a [carbon footprint] profile for English speaking production in Canada. Radio-Canada intends to issue its own report at the beginning of 2024.

Clarkson pointed to the fact that road travel and transport accounted for 2,772 tonnes of CO2 emissions, compared to 1,217 CO2 emissions from air travel, as a figure that stood out in the report. “I think this gives us an opportunity to really think about how we plan our productions,” she says.

The BBC founded the albert calculator in 2011 to provide a tool for film and TV productions to measure the impact of their activities from pre- to post-production. The calculator uses global averages and benchmarks to determine the level of carbon emissions associated with these production activities, according to the report.

“They’ve been using it as an industry for 10 years. We’re just starting here in Canada,” says Clarkson, adding that it is important to get the industry to “coalesce around one or two tools” to be able to create “really rich national snapshot” of the industry’s impact.

Clarkson says CBC’s carbon footprint requirement was already having the effect of creating awareness about the environmental impact of productions.

“There’s actually a lot of people who said [that] before we imposed this carbon calculator requirement, they hadn’t thought of it at all … that they absolutely did things differently and more intentionally because they had to grab the data and then put it into the calculator.”

Now that the report has set an initial benchmark, CBC will start looking at how series are doing year-over-year with their carbon footprints.

“It’s not perhaps as simple as one might think but there are lessons to be learned when you’ve got a [multi-season] series and it’s year-over-year [data].”

Clarkson said CBC plays a “supportive role” for producers navigating the albert system and greener production options, and is committed to releasing carbon footprint data on an annual basis with Radio-Canada.

Through CBC’s vantage point, we will release a report on what we’re finding every year and, with the bigger data, it will be more granular.”

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