Extreme heat, torrential rain, flooding, and other threats to lives around the world, caused by climate change, are increasing in both frequency and intensity. To slow down the speed of global warming, just reporting on the crisis is not enough.　Media organizations also need to examine and reduce their CO2 emissions.

In Europe and the US, efforts by members of the media industry to calculate and reduce CO2 emissions in program and content production started in the 2000s. They have collaborated to create standards and tools in their countries and regions which have been adopted by major media companies, embedding emission calculation and reduction planning into routine production procedures. These precedents and the 2015 Paris Climate Accord spurred more media organizations into action around the world, including Japan.

The fifth installment of this series examines the efforts made by the visual media industry, with a particular focus on the specific measures Japanese media organizations have explored in various program genres. Measures using the latest technologies implemented during the production of an ongoing NHK period drama series, Berabou Tsutajū Eiga no Yume-banashi (Unbound), and other examples illustrate the challenges as well as insights for future productions.

The authors of this report include members of NHK’s Environment and Energy Secretariat, a team promoting climate change actions within NHK, which took part in those experiments to find the best ways to reduce emissions in the production process in the Japanese audiovisual media industry.