The European Environmental Calculator (Eureca) for AVP

By project Green Screen

Published on 11 August 2022

Spain

About this good practice

Eureca is an instrument that helps the audiovisual industry to better understand and evaluate the environmental impact of their filming as well as to make their production processes more sustainable. Eureca is a pilot project financed by the European Regional Development Fund.

Eureca is focused not only on measuring but also on raising awareness and learning from this experience. The purpose of Eureca is to have a uniform European instrument so that it can be used by any type of audiovisual production in any country in Europe. It has been created in close partnership with producers, scientists and sustainability experts.
For that reason, Eureca is a tailor-made tool for all types of audiovisual productions. It is the instrument of preference for producers, line producers, eco-managers and heads of departments. The funding institutions at the European, national and regional levels can use Eureca as a valuable tool for certification and reporting as well as a basis for implementing and fostering sustainability promotion strategies

Eureca aims to have a rough reference assessment of your production, based on the financial budget and to detect the different important fields of impact. By reporting your actual impact, Eureca will generate an overview of the environmental savings. Eureca will also allow for the consolidation of broad results of different films at a regional level and will be linked to the Green Film certification scheme.

Resources needed

In monetary terms, we spent 28,900 euros (without VA, co-financed by the European Regional Development Fund).

However, our greatest investment of resources has been creating a large network of stakeholders to spread throughout Europe territory.

Evidence of success

So far, in a testing phase, 15 productions have participated in the use of the carbon footprint calculator and have managed to reduce their carbon emissions by at least 6%.
Thanks to this process, a validation and methodology for standardization has been designed, implemented and tested. This may serve as a future protocol for creating a sustainable film seal within the Green Screen project.

Potential for learning or transfer

Our previous experience of adapting VAF’s calculator and starting to use this with the AVP sector led us to identify the need for the existing calculator to include some additional features:

a) Measure the wider ecological impact of the film production process.
b) Be much more user-friendly.
c) Improve its usability for the AVP companies/productions.
d) Provide resources to help the producers with sustainability planning as well as monitoring and reporting.
e) Facilitate the conversion and consolidation of carbon data across different countries and regions.

The pilot action gave us the possibility to adapt our previous tool into an online calculator for international and multilingual application which is capable of measuring not only the carbon footprint, but also the ecological footprint of an audiovisual production.