CURIOUS TO BE CARBON NEUTRAL

Curious Film is pleased to announce it has joined Landcare Research’s carboNZeroCert programme and will begin measuring all carbon emissions from its corporate and production activities from 1 October 2008.

Over the next 12 months, Curious Film will measure and reduce the company’s greenhouse gas emissions as part of a thorough independent verification audit, which will be completed in October 2009.

When the audit is completed, Curious Film will offset any unavoidable emissions using a verifiable carbon offsetting provider. As a result, all shoots undertaken with Curious Film will be carbon neutral regardless of location, budget and client sector from 1 October 2008.

“We are committed to achieving carbon neutrality for all our productions. We are implementing sustainable practices both on location and in the office in an effort to reduce our emissions at source. What we cannot reduce, we will offset,” says Matt Noonan, executive producer at Curious Film.

“We have chosen to work with carboNZero because it is firmly grounded on over a decade of research on climate change, greenhouse gas measurement and carbon monitoring, with technical and ethical oversight from a highly regarded independent advisory panel. The credibility and integrity provided by the carboNZero programme is important to Curious Ltd and our productions,” says Noonan.

Curious Film is also working with independent consultants to develop a Best Practise Production Guideline to continually improve the company’s emissions performance on a long-term basis.

“Our carbon neutral programme is vital because of Australia and New Zealand’s remoteness. We want international clients to feel comfortable about shooting in the Southern Hemisphere, and we want local agencies and clients to feel comfortable shooting overseas while still remaining carbon neutral,” he says.

While researching the carboNZero programme, Curious Film discovered many corporate clients already have very strong environmental policies in place and are likely to expect more stringent environmental credentials from their agency and production suppliers.

CarboNZero will monitor the ways that corporates measure their own production emissions to avoid double-counting. Given the complexity of measuring carbon emissions, Curious Film will bare the costs of its carbon neutral program entirely, without increasing production costs for agencies and clients.