From Glass to Glass — How the media industry is working together to map its carbon footprint.
How the Responsible Media Forum, Bristol University and sustainability specialists are coming together to understand the environmental impact of delivering TV to our living rooms.
On the 5th of August, as part of ITV’s social purpose strategy, ITV published ambitious environmental targets, with the goal of limiting the impact of climate change to the internationally recognised maximum of 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels. The targets cover four main areas of focus — reducing our direct and indirect carbon emissions; creating a 100% sustainable supply chain; becoming zero waste; and embedding a sustainable culture amongst all of our staff. You can read more about our pledge here (link), but for now, I wanted to dig a little bit deeper into that first topic: reducing our emissions.
Reducing our emissions
Carbon emissions are generally categorised into those that an organisation has direct control over and those that are part of the supply chain. These categories are referred to as Scope 1 (direct emissions from burning fossil fuels, for example in buildings and vehicles), Scope 2 (indirect emissions from using electricity) and Scope 3 (all other indirect emissions, which can often be the bulk of an organisations impact). ITV have pledged to reduce our Scope 1 & 2 emissions by 46.2% and our scope 3 emissions by 28% by 2030. Setting ambitious targets is a great way to drive change, but measuring against those is notoriously tricky, especially given how complicated modern supply chains are.
But we’re definitely not alone. All industries and organisations have a responsibility to work towards reducing their environmental footprint, and in many cases the challenges of measuring against targets are shared across industry segments. As we dig deeper into our supply chain and learn more about our carbon footprint, we need to work together to share those learnings so that we can all benefit.
The Responsible Media Forum and DIMPACT
The Responsible Media Forum is a partnership between 25 leading media companies, aiming to identify and take action on the social and environmental challenges facing the sector. Within this group of organisations, one of the areas where we can definitely collaborate on is understanding the impact of our digital distribution pipelines. The infrastructure to deliver modern television services is not unique to any one broadcaster, and so many of the components are either the same or similar that it makes no sense each of us trying to estimate the impact alone. And this is where DIMPACT comes in.
DIMPACT (https://dimpact.org/about) is a collaboration between the Responsible Media Forum participants and computer scientists at the University of Bristol, facilitated by sustainability consultants Carnstone. The goal is to build a tool that will allow media organisations to calculate the carbon footprint of delivering television services to users, highlighting the impact of components all the way from the broadcast facility through to the users screen. It’s not a simple process as there are lots of different systems that work together, but the DIMPACT tool takes care of many of the calculations.
In its simplest form, the DIMPACT tool is a mathematical model that represents the way that broadcasters make content available on digital platforms. The main inputs are a combination of the power used in broadcasters’ facilities plus the total amount of time that users spend browsing and watching content. Using these two inputs and an awful lot of information gathered by the team, the tool calculates the approximate amount of carbon that is generated by all of the systems in between the broadcaster and the viewer.
There is still a lot of information for broadcasters to research and calculate: looking at the energy usage of the broadcast plant; collating usage information from platform statistics; analysing all of the data flowing through our networks; often working with our suppliers to better understand our indirect impacts as well. And as we work together, we can refine the model, improve the methods and continually learn from each other.
How will we use the information?
Having the information is great, but it’s how we use it that will really make the difference.
There are three main areas where we plan to use the data that the DIMPACT tool provides us with.
- The first is to map out “hotspots” in our energy usage, highlighting areas where we may be wasting energy, and where we can focus our efforts to have the most positive impact.
- As we improve in these hotspot areas, the data also works as a very useful benchmark against which we can measure progress against our targets, allowing us to track against our goals and make sure that we stay on course to deliver by 2030.
- And finally, as we move into a future where the way that people are consuming content is changing, we can better understand the impact that has on our planet. How does IP distribution stack up against a more traditional broadcast world, where high power transmitters on the tops of hills are supplanted by broadband connections to peoples’ homes?
We are already starting to get some interesting highlights from the data that we’ve managed to gather so far, but there is still a way to go to properly understand the whole distribution chain. Working on this challenge together as a media industry has definitely made the process much less daunting.
