Travel, transport and materials are some of the largest contributors to carbon emissions in the Canadian film and TV industry, according to member observations in the first annual progress report from Canadian screen industry coalition Green Frame.

The sustainability coalition was launched at Toronto’s Sustainable Production Forum (SPF) in September 2024 with the goal of reducing environmental impact and increasing sustainability in the Canadian screen industry. Among the group’s member organizations are Crown corporations such as Telefilm Canada, the National Film Board of Canada (NFB) and CBC/Radio-Canada, along with national content financiers such as the Canada Media Fund (CMF) and the Bell Fund.

The report was published at SPF2025 in Toronto during a panel led by Mark Shapland of the Independent Production Fund (IPF), Telefilm’s Elisa Suppa, the Bell Fund’s Marcia Douglas and Lisa Clarkson and Elsa Tokunaga of CBC.

“A key tenet or objective of coming together as a group for Green Frame was about accountability,” said Douglas. “It’s not just us in some little room talking to each other, but it’s us bringing back and sharing what we’ve learned, both with each other and with all of you, and learning as individual organizations what more we can be doing and how we can step forward together.”

According to the report, over the past year each of the member organizations have worked together and independently to achieve greater sustainability in their operations, while observing the industry’s overall trends and reporting on sustainability tools and carbon emissions.

According to the NFB, travel by plane was by far the largest contributor to the industry’s carbon footprint, followed by physical buildings and technological infrastructure.

Telefilm identified transportation and materials, including food, as the primary contributors to production-related carbon emissions, while CBC/Radio-Canada cited travel and transport as the main culprits.

Amongst its other observations, the Shaw Rocket Fund found that developing and implementing a sustainability plan was a barrier for low-budget productions, and that not many sustainability tools are focused on animation.

Regarding sustainability progress made in 2024-25, CBC/Radio-Canada has mandated that all eligible in-house productions use the BAFTA Albert calculator by 2026, and that 25% of those productions be Albert-certified.

For CBC in particular, the pubcaster requires that all its independent Canadian productions must adopt the Albert carbon calculator by 2026, and that all returning Canadian independent productions be Albert-certified.

The Indigenous Screen Office, meanwhile, has incorporated sustainability into its guidelines and scoring criteria, and the Broadcasting Accessibility Fund is initiating a sustainability element in grant applications in either late 2025 or early 2026.

Green Frame is also working towards creating a unified sustainability template or templates, analyzing those from organizations such as CBC, Telefilm, CMF and the producer-led eco-coalition Producing for the Planet to determine similarities and differences.

In regards to education, most of Green Frame’s members offered sustainable production training to their production-related staff, with the report estimating that a training offer was extended to 4,008 employees. Some organizations, such as the Bell Fund, Shaw Rocket Fund and IPF, offered training to all of their staff.

CBC/Radio-Canada developed its own courses, including a climate literacy and climate journalism program, while Telefilm and IPF have extended sustainability education to the teams of funded projects.

Although not all of Green Frame’s member organizations have created formal sustainability plans, the report says that each organization has “advanced their sustainability thinking over the past year.” In June, the Black Screen Office helped coordinate a shared statement of values among more than 75 industry stakeholders, which included a commitment to working toward environmental sustainability.

The full 2024-25 progress report can be found here.

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