D2.1 Policy and best practices
How are European nations addressing the environmental impact of their film, television, and streaming industries? Today, the StreamSCAPES project releases its latest deliverable: a comprehensive comparative assessment mapping policy measures shaping the Sustainable Climate Transition (SCT) across the audiovisual and Video-on-Demand (VOD) sectors.
Covering nine European countries (Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, the Netherlands, North Macedonia, Poland, Romania, and Sweden), alongside Nordic regional cooperation, this new report combines extensive desk research with stakeholder interviews. The findings reveal a policy landscape characterised by growing institutional capacity but limited legal formalisation. While a relatively developed infrastructure for sustainable production has emerged in several countries, these approaches rely predominantly on voluntary measures, financial incentives, and eco-conditionality rather than binding regulations.
More importantly, the report highlights a major structural imbalance: sustainability measures remain concentrated at the production stage. In contrast, digital distribution and major VOD platforms, which operate largely outside national frameworks, remain under-addressed despite their significant environmental footprint. To overcome these hurdles, the authors suggest strengthening the legal anchoring of existing initiatives, expanding policies beyond production, and improving cross-domain coordination.
