Rethinking Where Sustainability Happens in Entertainment

By Nick Grimm, Sr. Sustainability Consultant

Sustainability in the entertainment industry has never been more visible. Studios have formed sustainability teams, productions have hired on-set managers and eco reps, and stakeholders now expect everyone to reduce waste and adopt alternative energy, all while navigating the relentless time and budget pressures inherent to production.

Yet despite this surge in activity, meaningful progress remains frustratingly slow.

The reason? We're pulling the wrong lever.

The Visibility Trap

The industry has concentrated sustainability efforts, responsibility, and interventions at the production stage, misidentifying where change can actually happen. Production has become both the focus and the scapegoat when sustainability efforts fall short.

Here's the uncomfortable truth: production is where many emissions appear, but not where they originate.

When sustainability interventions happen only on set without addressing the upstream decisions, policies, planning, and incentives that shape every production, we limit what we can realistically achieve. We treat symptoms, not causes.

The Problem with "Too Late"

From a systems perspective, by the time a project reaches set, decision-makers have already locked in the most consequential environmental choices. Scripts have gone through multiple rounds of development notes and rewrites. Budgets and schedules have been scrutinized line by line. 

When sustainability finally enters the conversation, often late in pre-production, sometimes only days before shooting begins, it's no longer a design choice. It must negotiate against decisions already in motion, fighting for scraps of time and budget that no one ever intended for it, and many crews don’t have the bandwidth to take on the additional responsibility.

On-set sustainability becomes both the focus and the distraction, while the upstream structures that shape every production remain largely unexamined and unchanged.

There are exceptions, of course. Dedicated groups are working hard on exactly this issue. But the entire system needs context, education, and empowerment to support industry-wide transformation.

Understanding Leverage vs. Visibility

Jay Forrester, the founder of system dynamics, observed that when people try to solve complex problems, they tend to pull hardest on the most obvious levers, even though those levers are rarely the ones that meaningfully change outcomes. The result is what he called policy resistance: enormous effort applied in the wrong place, producing frustration rather than progress.  

Building on Forrester's insight, Donella Meadows showed that systems hide their most powerful leverage points in goals, rules, incentives, and information flows, the least visible places.

In other words, we frequently mistake visibility for leverage.

Production sustainability reflects this exact dynamic. Because the set makes impacts easiest to see, it has become the default intervention point. But by the time a project goes into production, someone has already designed the system. Pulling harder there doesn't resolve the underlying structure; it simply concentrates pressure on the part of the system with the least time, capacity, and authority to change it.

Where Change Should Begin

In my experience, the place to house the most consequential sustainability choices in film and television is far upstream, and they likely wouldn’t even be recognized as "sustainability decisions."

This is where writers build worlds, develop storylines, flesh out characters, and polish dialogue. 

And production companies, financiers, and streamers allocate capital, set release dates, and put the machine in motion.

When we leave these upstream decisions unaddressed, we force sustainability to operate as a corrective measure rather than a design principle. It becomes a problem to manage instead of a solution to integrate. We lose the opportunity to normalize, collaborate, and actually solve problems at their source.

No More Add-On’s, just Infrastructure

Systems don't change through good intention. They change when people recognize issues, understand the existing system, and identify the right levers to pull to initiate a systems change. 

When sustainability is embedded in governance, targets, education, incentives, and organizational culture, downstream production becomes simpler, more financially viable, and significantly more effective. Treated as core infrastructure rather than an add-on, sustainability no longer needs justification; it becomes the default way work gets done.

The most durable sustainability outcomes emerge when the entire system is engaged. On-set sustainability is essential and will always play a critical role. But it cannot operate in isolation. Lasting change depends on upstream decisions in development, finance, and leadership that determine whether sustainability becomes part of the operating infrastructure or a last-minute add-on.