Sustainability Practice for Media Companies Clima Launches

Clima, set up by Rachel Smy and Victoria Harvey, has launched as a formal iteration of the work that Rachel and Victoria have been doing for the last year. Clima works with media, advertising  and production organisations to help them work towards their net zero goals. 

“It just seems that there is a huge gap for guidelines or standards that are specifically designed for the media sector to help them towards net zero goals. Understanding how media and production work is essential to knowing where all the carbon mapping and reduction should take place,” said Victoria. “The generic standards out there just don’t mould well into media operations. They’re either too big and onerous or miss big swathes of important elements of creative output.”

Both have a significant amount of experience working in the sector. Rachel has over 12 years working with Ogilvy creating their environmental management framework to ISO14001 standard and Victoria has many years as a sustainability director with a strong academic background in climate change.

With only 9% of UK businesses in general making any kind of climate pledges, there is a huge needed for every company, no matter what size to get their ducks in a row on sustainable business practices and start to measure their carbon output. 

“The UK has a goal to reach net zero by 2050. That’s too late in our opinion, and we’re not even on track to meet that,” says Rachel. “So as a sector we need to up our game and show we’re making a contribution."

If not for ethical reasons then it will become essential to new business. Increasingly clients such as Sky are asking for information on company’s environmental management frameworks or environmental statements, so if new business is the aim, this will need some attention. 

"The latest statistics are that UK businesses contribute to around 17% of the country’s emissions, that’s a huge amount, just after transport and energy as the two biggest. So we need to look at what we’re doing at work as well as at home,” comments Victoria. “We need the industry to lead the change, both operationally and in the influence the creative output has”. 

When it comes to goals, Clima is keen on communicating the scale of what’s needed. “We’re keen to emphasise that we cannot offset our way out of this crisis. Net Zero should be the goal, and 2030 should be the date. All the scientific evidence is pointing towards this set of goals to avoid a full on climate crisis. The good news is that this is entirely possible for most businesses and research shows this is also what staff and clients want to see”.