The BBC's Journey To Net Zero: Technology's Key Role In Sustainability
Microsoft News, April 3rd, 2023
It's all under the directive of Danielle Mulder, the BBC's Group Director of Sustainability. She was appointed to the role in 2021 with a remit to achieve net zero by 2030 across the global BBC organisation.
It's no small task. Since its first broadcast just over 100 years ago, the BBC now reaches a global audience of 492 million people. There's a fair chance you'll have watched a programme, caught up on the news, read an article, or listened to a radio show produced by its 22,000 employees. In 2022, people spent 53 billion hours consuming BBC content in the UK alone.
But broadcasting and production at this scale comes with a sizeable carbon footprint. The BBC calculated that their greenhouse gas emissions in 2019/20 came to 1.3 million tonnes CO2e globally. That's the emission equivalent of approximately 283,000 round-trip flights between London and New York.