Environmental sustainability

We aim to provide the world class services and programmes the BBC is renowned for while doing everything we can to keep our environmental impact to a minimum.

Environmental and sustainability issues have long been reflected in the content we make and broadcast, so it’s important to us that they are also embedded in the way we operate and run the BBC.

We can’t enhance our audiences’ understanding of climate change and what’s needed to transition to Net Zero unless we are also working on the solutions to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions within our own industry. As a publicly funded organisation, we understand that we have a particular responsibility in this area.

Reducing the environmental impact of our programmes

It is a priority to ensure that programme-making, which is at the core of the BBC, is environmentally sustainable. From first draft to final transmission, we are continually exploring and implementing ways to lower the carbon emissions generated by our output, but crucially without affecting its quality. This means tackling practical, day-to-day challenges and spreading sustainable values throughout the production supply chain. 

The BBC continues to play an active and prominent role in the collaborative pan-industry BAFTA albert Consortium and Directorate, of which it is a founder member, having gifted the albert carbon calculator to Bafta over a decade ago. The aims of the Consortium are to reduce the negative environmental impacts arising from TV production and promote positive action to tackle climate change behind the camera as well as showcasing it on screen.

The albert online tools

The BAFTA albert Consortium provides the global TV industry with online tools to both measure the carbon footprint of making programmes and to engage production teams with greener ways of working.

The albert carbon calculator has been used by more than 2300 production companies and 150 broadcasters in 48 countries around the world.  Use of the albert carbon calculator is an essential requirement of albert certification,  which is a broader online tracking system used to monitor sustainability initiatives instigated by production teams.  Once evidence has been provided for their pledges, productions are rewarded with the albert logo to use on their end credits, in recognition of their greener working practices.  

To ensure sustainability is baked into every production, the BBC has made albert certification mandatory for all TV commissions from January 2022.  More information can be found on the BBC Commissioning website.

So how are BBC productions doing?

As detailed in our latest BBC Annual Report & Accounts, these are the performance figures for commissioned BBC TV content in scope for albert for the 2022/23 financial year:

• 99% of all output completed a carbon footprint.
• 92% of output commissioned since January 2022 completed sustainable production certification, which is mandatory.
• 96% of all output, commissioned at any time, completed sustainable production certification .

Portraying sustainability on-screen

When it comes to the content our audiences watch, listen and read, the BBC needs to ensure that it’s reflecting the changes we’re seeing in society towards more sustainable ways of living. We have a responsibility to help our audiences understand the impact of climate change and the steps we can take to transition to Net Zero.

Before we commission any programme, a formal conversation takes place about how environmental concerns can be appropriately and authentically considered or reflected in the editorial content of the project. This encompasses the mindful choices that can be made around sustainable settings or behaviours on screen, as well as the subjects or themes of a production where relevant.

Our Planet Now is the BBC’s ongoing commitment to programming which explicitly explores the environment and the challenges facing the natural world. Further information can be found on the BBC’s dedicated Our Planet Now website and there are also Our Planet Now collections on BBC iPlayer and BBC Sounds.

Delivering on the Climate Content Pledge

In November 2021, at COP26, the BBC was one of 12 broadcasters and streamers to sign the Climate Content Pledge, committing us to doing more and better climate story-telling on screen across all genres..

Building on our unrivalled reach within the UK, and informing audiences globally

We are committed to reaching the widest possible audience with climate and environmental themes, putting them at the heart of our biggest entertainment shows, our incisive global journalism, our inspiring content for children, and with a continued focus on producing outstanding world-renowned Natural History series. 

In Financial Year 2022/23 we reached approximately 67% of the 16+ UK population (over 38 million) with TV and Radio content (outside of News bulletins and sequence programming) containing explicit environmental themes.  We will continue to measure ourselves against this metric, and report against it in our Annual Report. 

Our environmental content ranges from landmark Natural History shows like The Green Planet (the most popular factual show on the BBC in 2022, reaching almost 13 million) to specially themed episodes of our most popular programmes, such as The One Show’s residency at COP26 and our outstanding radio content, such as 39 Ways to Save the Planet on Radio 4, Sow, Grow, Show and Let it Grow campaigns on Radio 2 in 2022 and 2023 and City on Mission, charting Leeds' journey to Net Zero, on 5 Live. 

In 2022, around 13 million people watched the Platinum Party at the Place with HRH Prince William’s call to ‘restore our planet’, while Frozen Planet II has reached 16 million on BBC One and iPlayer. The oil industry came under the microscope with Big Oil v the World. Radio 2 and the One Show collaborated on Go Green, a series of sustainable lifestyle features.  In the autumn of 2022, BBC Sport produced the first Green Sport Awards to celebrate people in Sport contributing to a more sustainable future.

Beyond the UK the BBC’s environmental content continues to educate, entertain and inform. Globally, since 2016, over a billion have watched a BBC Planet title such as Blue Planet II, The Green Planet and Frozen Planet II.

Measurements of audience reach don’t include all our incidental and implicit content around sustainability such as:

• Electric cars and synthetic fuel on Top Gear
• Reduce, Reuse and Recycle week in The Great British Sewing Bee
• Climate subplots in our dramas, like Rules of the Game
• Light touch references in our radio conversations
• The work of BBC Education, helping distribute over a million seedballs to schools and inspiring thousand with The Regenerators.

We are also working towards an industry-wide solution to track and report against this type of inclusion.

We also track the impact of our environmental content from the perspective of our key stakeholders, our audience.  This has revealed that claimed understanding of key terms like ‘net zero’ soared after COP26, when the BBC embedded relevant content across genres, from Daytime to Comedy, with 51% of UK adults saying the BBC increased their understanding of environmental issues.  More than 80% of viewers said their concern about climate change grew after watching Frozen Planet II, with 61% reporting subsequently engaging in at least one pro-environmental behaviour, such as reducing energy use.

In addition to our regular polling in 2022 we piloted an enhanced form of impact measurement around The Green Planet, which revealed significant associations between viewing The Green Planet, pro-environmental behaviours and enhanced wellbeing.  For more information watch here.

Embedding a consideration of climate themes in all our processes

A mandatory question on how productions are considering the environment and sustainability in their editorial was included in our television commissioning process in December 2020. In 2022, we aligned our Radio commissioning processes, so that they too incorporate a consideration of environmental themes.

An inclusion of a question isn’t enough though – we have been working to ensure that these are meaningful conversations by engaging, educating and inspiring internal editorial teams and external suppliers, through:

• Implementing our commitment to train 100% of public service non-News editorial staff. We have delivered in-depth training to over 1600 colleagues since COP26, between December 2021 and June 2023.
• Holding monthly internal meetings to share insights, best practice and learnings, as well as foster collaboration, between senior editorial leaders across our output and platforms.
• Revamping our TV and Radio Commissioning sites with bespoke insights and tips on incorporating sustainability in editorial.
• Holding and participating in multiple internal and external masterclasses and events to upskill editorial colleagues, including Climate Creatives, one day BBC Academy virtual festivals held in 2021 and 2022, open to the entire industry. These included external speakers, briefing sessions from expert climate communicators, postcard films and a message from Director General, Tim Davie. There were over 1,600 live session views on each day and these sessions remain available to watch again.

We are committed to continuing to engage, educate and inform staff and suppliers on the topic.

Ensuring our efforts are informed by the science

Apart from science-based Masterclasses, we have published an Environmental Sustainability Topic Guide and Glossary for staff and suppliers. This pulls together, in one place and in layman’s terms, the current state of scientific knowledge, to give non-specialists confidence in creating content in this area.

Collaboration and Communication

We are working together with other UK broadcasters, bodies and industry groups including Bafta albert, the Responsible Media Forum, PACT and OKRE, to better understand our impact and create industry wide knowledge on the best ways to inspire and engage audiences.

Net Zero and reducing our operational impact

We recognise that as a large organisation we have a responsibility to reduce our GHG emissions in line with 1.5 degrees of global warming and to reduce our wider environmental impacts.  We are committed to pursuing a target driven approach as outlined in our Environmental Sustainability Policy.

In October 2021 we set Science Based Targets (SBTs) for the BBC Group to cut our GHG emissions to Net Zero (NZ), which was followed by a commitment to the new SBTi NZ standard which will require setting Long Term Science Based Targets for approval by the SBTi. As part of this alignment to the new NZ standard, we will also be reviewing and updating our offset strategy. The details of our SBTs, set against our baseline GHG emissions for 2019/20, together with details of how we calculate and report on this data, are available on the BBC Environmental Sustainability website. Our performance against environmental targets is also published in the BBC Annual Report and Accounts.

We will continue to buy electricity on a renewable tariff for our UK buildings, while monitoring systems in our main properties allow us to identify anomalies in energy consumption and to operate our technology as effectively and efficiently as we can.

We are also transitioning our vehicle fleet to entirely electric by 2030.

We have a Zero Waste to Landfill target, which we will aim to have certified by The Carbon Trust. We’ve published a statement of intent to eliminate Single Use Plastic from BBC Operations.

To tackle the 68% of our baseline emissions that come from the BBC’s supply chain, we are focusing on engaging our suppliers with delivering change. We have a responsible procurement strategy, selecting and developing suppliers who share the BBC’s objective of putting social, environmental and economic sustainability at the heart of how and what we buy. BBC Group is also part of the Carbon Disclosure Project’s (CDP) supply chain solution, undertaking the project’s rating and disclosure process, together with over 200 BBC Group suppliers. In 2022, the BBC was rated B for climate strategy maturity by CDP which is the average for businesses in the Media, Telecomms and Data Centre Services sectors. Decarbonisation support webinars are being hosted by the BBC and CDP for suppliers and all BBC Procurement contract managers are being provided sustainable procurement and carbon emission training.

Working with Microsoft, the BBC has also developed a GHG emissions reporting platform for all BBC Group data. The platform will be the BBC’s central database for GHG emissions reporting across all scopes and will provide performance dashboards to track progress against targets. In future it will also track our waste, water and bio-diversity data.

A Planet Positive Approach

The BBC’s environmental impacts are not limited to its carbon emissions and so we hope to adopt a broader ‘planet positive’ strategy. We intend this to commit us to being both a net zero and nature positive organisation that will deliver ‘more good than harm’ to the planet.  This strategy will determine investment activity and partnership relationships that deliver nature positive outcomes.

We’ve joined the Science Based Targets for Nature working group and are aligning to the Taskforce on Nature Related Financial Disclosures (TCND) framework, which is currently out for consultation.  We are also investigating methodologies to calculate our biodiversity footprint in order to measure our biodiversity net gain performance.  In addition, we will be determining deforestation, water and land use risks in our supply chain, using our CDP supply chain questionnaires.  Our data driven approach will be underpinned by scientific rigour.

Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures

Embedding sustainability throughout the organisation, in every business area, is crucial if we are to achieve all of our environmental goals. An essential part of that process is the adoption of the Task Force on Climate-Related Financial Disclosure (TCFD) Framework, to which the BBC Group is now a signatory.

This work includes climate scenario and financial impact analysis, the results of which are included in our 2022/23 Annual Report.

Sustainable Culture

At the BBC we understand the importance of increasing our employees’ knowledge of climate science and the BBC’s environmental targets, and through bespoke workshops for teams and online training, we encourage them to share best practice in sustainable production and other green ways of working. Reflecting the particular responsibility we have to be guided by the science in our content, we are committed to training all editorial staff in the basics of climate change and the challenges facing our planet.

We offer both virtual trainer-led courses and remote online courses, which have been accessed by over 6,000 members of staff from different BBC departments across the UK and overseas. Staff engagement with environmental issues is also enhanced through internal communications campaigns and other online events and activities.