Media Climate Accord Aims to Offer United Approach to M&E Industry Sustainability Efforts

Media Climate Accord aims to offer united approach to M&E industry sustainability efforts By Neal Romanek

Thursday, October 9, 2025 - 11:29

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Lisa Collins (right) on stage during SVG Europe's Sustainability Forum

This year's IBC saw the launch of a new initiative to track sustainability progress in the media industry. The Media Climate Accord (MCA), developed by the Media Tech Sustainability Series (MTSS), aims to unite the global media and entertainment technology sector in a shared commitment to climate action.

The accord invites media companies to become signatories and commit to take more concrete steps towards sustainable progress. These include:

Achieve a 40% reduction in energy consumed per streaming hour by 2030, measured against a 2025 baseline.

Reach net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 to be in alignment with the Paris Agreement, but ideally to target 2040.

Promote open standards for energy and carbon measurement across the media value chain.

Embed sustainability into production, digital workflows, and distribution systems.

Share progress through the MCA's annual benchmarking platform.

There are multiple protocols across the media space attempting to address sustainability, often with very little coordination between them. This siloed approach has meant that organisations may be doing diligent work in their own speciality, while ignoring adjacent parts of the content workflow. BAFTA albert, for example, has developed a speciality in physical production but has little bandwidth for overseeing what happens to media files once they move into a post facility or CDN.

The MCA's suggested action steps are broad and are aimed at the whole spectrum of the industry. While inviting the vast variety of media and entertainment to act as in unison may sound like asking for trouble, the very expansiveness of the accord may be its strength. At heart it's simply a broad check list to point companies in the right direction and allow them to analyse their progress.

The accord avoids excessive prescription, which is likely to provoke backlash in an industry where every player insists that its particular circumstances are special and different. It's hard to look at the MCA suggestions and find a reason not to agree them.

Communicate, report, showcase

At SVG Europe's pre-IBC Sustainability Forum, Lisa Collins, co-founder with Barbara Lange of the MTSS, talked to delegates about the launch of the Media Climate Accord.

The Media Climate Accord is really about the industry as a whole coming together not different pillars of the industry, but the entire industry to communicate, to report and showcase its numbers. We see year on year that the transport industry is cutting carbon, but as a media industry, with the eyeballs out there on us, we're still not very good at doing that.

The accord is a work in progress, and MTSS is inviting expertise from the industry to develop benchmarks for best practice. The proposal for decarbonisation is to stay in line with the Paris Agreement which aims to limit global warming to 1.5C over pre-industrial levels, and a 2040 goal for a net zero media industry has been pencilled in.

We need industry to come talk to us about what these goals should be, said Collins. Maybe our 2040 target is a bit soon for some people. Do we need to extend that? The Media Climate Accord is yours, not ours.

Collins emphasised that the accord is not trying to introduce yet another methodology to the industry for carbon accounting or sustainability tracking.

This is about sharing best practice. We don't want this to be a huge, onerous task. We want to use the data that people have already got and the reports that people are already producing, she said.

The Paris Agreement is binding for most of the world, but not all of it. This year, the United States, the world's second-biggest carbon emitter, withdrew from it (again). This frees US companies of any legal obligation to decarbonise. The withdrawal, along with ongoing political strife in the US, could hinder the decarbonisation of media and entertainment as a whole, especially given that the industry often takes its cues from the US market. An alternative scenario, however, could be stronger international cooperation outside the US, seeing some US companies getting left behind in favour of more future-proof partners.

The Paris Agreement does not mandate how each country should decarbonise, but does say those in the most developed countries, which includes Europe, should aim for earlier targets - ie, net zero by 2050 should be the goal only for less developed countries.

Last year's global temperature average breached the 1.5C limit for the first time, at a record 1.6C of additional warming. While a multi-year trend must be recorded before the 1.5C target can be officially said to have been lost, the urgency of the situation couldn't be clearer.

Steps, year on year

The Media Climate Accord aims to encompass the full value chain of media, broken down into four segments - green production, an efficient digital factory, sustainable distribution and media consumption.

We want to show that the industry is on a journey and we're making steps year on year'

At the time of its launch, the MCA already included Akamai, The DPP, Greening of Streaming, Humans Not Robots, Irdeto, Ross Video, Sony, SDVI and France T l visions among its signatories. Collins also said there have been discussions with the UN, facilitated by Akamai, to get involvement in the accord as well.

One that we're pleased about is France T l visions, said Collins. We need the broadcasters involved, and we are having those initial conversations. France T l visions is the only one that I can talk about publicly today, but there are others.

The most important part of

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