How green is your media?
The entertainment industry is trying to achieve sustainability in new—and creative—ways
By Jonathan Shieber, Senior Strategist at LaunchSquad
Last month, a trio of executives from across the entertainment industry joined the up-and-coming musician AY and the climate media maven Joel Makower in a small, windowless room tucked away on the third floor of the Javits Center’s massive glass and steel conference center in Manhattan’s West Side to talk about sustainability.
Part of New York Climate Week’s sweeping survey of all the ways government, industry, and media are trying (with varying degrees of success) to limit the impacts of climate change and reverse course on fossil fuel emissions, the panel on media decarbonization lacked the flash of some of larger events with megawatt level star power. Instead, it focused on the basic blocking and tackling of making entertainment production more sustainable and including more climate narratives in streaming storytelling. Still, sustainable thinking in the entertainment industry has come a long way since artists simply advocated for organizations supporting the policies they cared about.
While worthwhile causes still get a boost from the celebrity megaphone, these days artists, writers, producers, and maybe even some executives, are as concerned with sustainability in their work as they are with rallying fans to support organizations aligned with their missions.
Greening the business of entertainment
In June, Coldplay, the band who came in second only to Taylor Swift for earnings from their recent 2024 tour, announced they had reduced the carbon footprint of their sold-out stadium live shows by 59%. Two years after the band came under fire for greenwashing for a partnership with the biofuel developer Neste, the group has taken steps to ensure that offsets aren’t playing as much of a role in reducing their carbon footprint and using direct action to green their tours.
They’re not alone. Massive Attack orchestrated what may have been the most sustainable concert yet when they performed in August in their hometown of Bristol. Onstage at the Javits Center panel, the musician AY touted his own Battery Tour, which aims to run on renewable energy and batteries rather than fossil fuels.
Sports facilities and their owners are taking steps to decarbonize, too, making the prospects of performing more sustainable for every artist and athlete walking through the stadium doors. The Climate Pledge Arena, in Seattle, earned the title of the World’s First Net-Zero Stadium, but other sports and live entertainment facilities are racing to prove their sustainability bona fides.
As the strategy director of the Music Sustainability Alliance, Makower, who also founded the climate and sustainability-focused trade media outlet Trellis Group, noted that cross-pollination is happening with his organization and the Green Sports Alliance to share notes about how lessons from events like Coachella and the Stagecoach Festival can be applied to sports.
Hollywood and big streaming services are also tackling the business of providing clean power and more environmentally friendly options for sets worldwide. With the Rocky Mountain Institute’s investment arm, Third Derivative, Netflix and the Walt Disney Co. created the Clean Mobile Power Initiative to invest in companies developing technologies to electrify sets and location-based filming. The group announced its first investments in August, working to bring solutions for zero-emission power to the industry within the next five years.
The streaming industry and Hollywood are even standardizing the production playbook to make sustainable initiatives as repeatable as possible. The Sustainable Entertainment Alliance has a production toolkit and resource library for best practices for how film shoots can easily go green.
But sustainable production practices aren’t the only ways the entertainment industry wants to be less extractive and have an impact on climate change. Streaming media and musicians are also trying to find ways to bring more money to conservation and restoration initiatives by turning nature into a creator itself.
Can nature be a star?
On Earth Day this year, the oldest living musician – clocking in at 4.5 billion years – made their debut on Spotify and Apple Music as an officially credited performer. Thanks to the work of Brian Eno and his Sounds Right initiative, NATURE is now an officially recognized musician by streaming services – and is receiving royalties for its performances and collaborations with several artists.
A percentage of revenue from streams resulting from collaborations with NATURE is collected by EarthPercent, a registered nonprofit organization, and is distributed to rights-based nature conservation and restoration projects in regions around the world. Those disbursements are directed by the Sounds Right Expert Advisory Panel, which includes biologists, environmental activists, indigenous representatives, and experts in conservation funding.
At the panel in New York, Rachel Kropa, one of the co-founders of the talent management agency Range Media Partners and a co-founder of Robert Downey Jr.’s climate initiative, FootPrint Coalition, said that there could be a way for streaming media to adopt similar practices to enable funding for nature conservation and restoration efforts.
“There are mechanisms to do it,” Kropa said. “Whether it’s product placement for nature or including nature as a [credited] character.”
Making more climate media
Still, one of the ways entertainment can have the biggest impact on climate change simply is by telling more climate stories.
New research out of Stanford University suggests that movies may be the “empathy machines” Roger Ebert once called them.
Getting the public more involved, engaged, and more comfortable with climate action, may be as simple as putting more compelling narratives with climate onscreen.
And here, too, Hollywood has the beginnings of a playbook – a Good Energy Playbook. This resource for better climate storytelling was assembled by experienced climate storytellers and screenwriters hoping to center more climate change narratives in creative storytelling.
Beyond the advocacy angle, audiences are hungry for more climate storytelling, according to recent research. One study from the media research and advocacy group Rare.org published in 2023 found that 70% of respondents were interested in seeing more climate-friendly behaviors in film and television.
“Americans understand the power of Hollywood to shape our cultural norms. As climate change increasingly touches all of our lives, audiences seem eager for Hollywood to lend a hand,” said Dr. Anirudh Tiwathia, lead behavioral scientist at Rare Entertainment Lab. “Including climate-friendly behaviors into TV and film content reflects the demands of a wide swath of the American public. This is low risk. And it comes with the potential for seismic impact.”
If audiences call for these stories, producers and screenwriters have yet to answer them. A research lab at Colby University conducted a survey of 250 of the most popular films made from 2013 to 2022 to see if they could pass a version of the “Bechdel Test” (which measures whether women are depicted accurately onscreen) designed to assess depictions of climate change.
Only 9% of the 250 films passed the test.
These depictions matter because entertainment has a real impact on attitudes and behaviors, according to Rare. In the past, positive depictions of behaviors have reduced rates of smoking and drunk driving, and increased the use of seatbelts. Perhaps the same can work for climate-friendly behaviors.
Here, Kropa’s ideas of benchmarking screenplays with criteria could work. With product placement, for instance, there’s a standard way that a production crew thinks about putting something on screen, and in a follow-up call, Kropa suggested a version that could be done for nature or depicting environmentally sustainable practices.
“If you had a practice similar to product placement where you say there has to be a certain number and kind of instances and mentions of practices, people could easily execute on that,” Kropa said.
Water (Cooler) Talk
🦠 GMOs are becoming a climate marketing battleground
In his front-page piece for the New York Times, Eric Lipton highlighted an emerging solution to help curb the use of pollutive chemical fertilizer. The secret? GMOs. While science has proven GMOs pose no inherent risk to health, you wouldn’t know it from looking at grocery store shelves, where an abundance of GMO-free branding reflects a strong apprehension shared by about half of consumers. So as new advances in genetic engineering allow researchers to create climate-forward innovations for food and fuel, journalists and comms teams alike need to accurately convey the unknowns around these novel inventions without ceding ground to unsubstantiated fearmongering.
🎬 To study how climate stories change minds, start by funding creatives
We need to change climate habits—but as scientists noted in new longitudinal research released last month, changing behaviors effectively requires understanding what motivates people to take climate action. Writing for Nature, social scientist Jessica Eise recounted her experience running a film festival as part of her research on how climate outreach and stories about human connection to the earth affect the sympathies of viewers. Eise set up the festival after receiving a National Science Foundation grant, part of which she earmarked to provide cash prizes that attracted over 200 films. The size and caliber of the submission pool enabled her to conduct larger-scale outreach, attract more attention, and perform better research: next year, the winning films will be shown to test groups to measure how climate narratives change attitudes. “If you want something to work,” Eise wrote, “you have to show you value other people’s time, skills and knowledge in a form that transcends all occupational boundaries: money.”
🎤 Should climate be a laughing matter?
You may have heard of climate fatigue, a feeling of inertia some people experience when inundated by distressing information about climate change. One English comedian is on a quest to end this apathy by taking a different approach to climate comms: making people laugh. Stuart Goldsmith told BBC News last week that he started writing bits about the climate to grapple with his own environmental dread. Now, he finds that his material brings up “the elephant in the room,” helping audiences confront the reality of climate change, their own feelings about it, and what they can do to help. His approach seems to resonate: Goldsmith’s 2023 Edinburgh Fringe show, Spoilers, snagged the festival’s top prize.