“I’ve never seen a lot of men in these conversations about sustainability.”

Sustainable Screens Australia is nearing its first birthday and on the hunt for its first Board members.

But the Not for Profit body is somewhat perplexed… where are all the men?

The organisation which was founded by three industry women -Anna Kaplan (Regen Studios), Tanzy Owen (formerly Endemol Shine Australia) and Art Department / Producer Jennifer McAuliffe – with 5 female directors on its interim Board and 3 women of 4 employees.

“My sense is that women have a sense of care for people and for place. We understand it, it’s almost like a mothering, I guess, of the Earth,” executive director Maree Cochrane tells TV Tonight.

“I feels to me like it’s very easy for women to take on the responsibility, but it’s actually such a collective responsibility. If I look at the production departments that really need to be thinking about reducing carbon emissions, they tend to be led by men.”

Sustainable Screens Australia aims to transform the production industry to one that integrates sustainability into everyday practices, and reduce environmental footprints.

Using the UK-created Albert carbon calculator, there are already Australian productions which have been certified for responsible production practices.

They include ITV’s I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here, Alone Australia, The Voice, My Kitchen Rules, Logie Awards, Love Island, The Chase; Fremantle’s Heartbreak High, Rock Island Mysteries, Heat, Restoration Australia, Grand Designs: Transformations; plus The Portable Door, Poker Face!, Wizards and Polar Bear Film. This week SBS Food series The Cookup with Adam Liaw became the first production to measure its carbon footprint using the Albert calculator, approved by SSA.

SSA has licensed tools from BAFTA to apply to the Australian industry through its members including ABC, AFTRS, BBC Studios, 10 / Paramount +, Nine / Stan, CJZ, Disney Studios, Docklands Studios Melbourne, Dreamchaser, Endemol Shine Australia, Film Art Media, ITV Studios (incl Lingo Pictures), Lune Media, Mashup Pictures, Matchbox Pictures, National Film and Sound Archive, Netflix, Pogue Productions, Regen Studios, SBS, Screen Australia, Screen NSW (under Create NSW), Screen Queensland, Screen Tasmania, Vic Screen, Victorian College of the Arts (Uni of Melbourne).

“In the UK, there’s sustainability coordinators and sustainability managers and some large productions might have a whole team. There might be three or four members of a sustainability or environmental crew,” she continues.

“All the broadcasters in the UK have made it mandatory that anything broadcast requires Albert’s certification. But it’s not mandatory here.

“We’re localising the tools for the Australian industry,” says Cochrane.

“We’ve got sustainable production methods and we’ve also got sustainability on screen, which is about looking at all the different ways you can incorporate things into narrative or a theme or character or the background of shot.

“They could have all of these elements that support or inspire audiences to act more sustainably. So it’s just normalising sustainable behaviour.”

SSA, which officially launched at the 2023 Sydney Film Festival, has big ambitions for the year ahead including training at universities in sustainable practices for the screen sector, and training accountants in sustainability.

“There’s so many ways we can tackle this. Some of them are really simple and some of them are cheap. Some of them make the whole process more cost-effective and efficient,” Cochrane explains.

“We’ve got no data in Australia, really, apart from Fremantle and ITV in terms of what emissions look like here. So we can make some assumptions.

“We assume that it’s going to be travel and transport that are the largest emitters in Australia because we’re such a decentralised country, and we do a lot of travel and we don’t have a lot of public transport infrastructure, outside cities. But we’d love to have that data to understand how we can start talking to government about how we can shift shift some things in terms of infrastructure.”

The call out for new Board members closes on 26 May 2024 and Cochrane is hopeful more men will raise their hand.

“In terms of applications I had two men apply for roles with us. The people that come to our working group conversations consistently are women. I can count on one hand, how many men I see in our working group discussions which are every two months, and previously once every month,” she recalls.

“But I’ve never seen a lot of men in these conversations about sustainability.”

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