Sustainability Forum returns with stories of low emissions and growing expertise

SVG Europe’s invite-only Sustainability Forum, part of The Summit that took place in Amsterdam the day before IBC2025, underlined what is being confirmed in industries worldwide – that sustainability and smart business decisions are converging.

“What we are finding is it gets easier, because the economics now work out,” said panellist Dan Cherowbrier, acting CTO at Formula E. “Twelve years ago, you had to pay extra to be sustainable. Now, what’s good for the planet is normally good for your pocket as well.”

The forum’s main discussion panel featured Marie-Claire Gill talking with Cherowbrier, FIS sustainability director Susanna Sieff, and Gravity Media director of ESG Rohan Mitchell. The discussion offered stories of good sustainable practice but with a helping of valuable practical strategies for building a resilient sports business.

Systematising sustainability in your organisation seems to be essential for success. Formula E has a dedicated VP of sustainability, Julia Pallé, who reports directly to the company’s CEO. But, given that sustainability is built into the zero-carbon tech powering Formula E, the company also mandates that sustainability is incorporated into all the C-suite KPIs.

The International Ski and Snowboard Federation (FIS) brought Sieff on as a dedicated sustainability director for the organisation in 2023.

“When they decided to have a sustainability division, the question was in which department should it be,” said Sieff. “The answer was to create a brand-new department in line with all the others. And I’m lucky because I see in some of our big events, sustainability can be under the communications division or marketing division or operations division. In our case we decided to have this across divisions, and I have the president helping me every day to push inside the federation for change.”

The FIS is an international federation, which includes the National Ski Association and over 200 local organisation committees, making it a challenge for a fully top-down approach. The goal is to help make each of these individual organisations more responsible for their own sustainability governance.

“It’s not all cupcakes and unicorns. Sometimes it’s super difficult,” continued Sieff. “Every two or three weeks we have a managerial meeting for all the event directors, but sometimes there’s something you don’t discover until the very end that you can probably do nothing about. But we are in a good position where we can speak to them about governance and we can improve.”

Carbon equals cost

With every passing year, broadcasters and federations are seeing that, as our dads always told us, reducing waste pays off financially. Fortunately, as sustainability is forced to go underground in some parts of the world as a topic of conversation, the real-world business benefits of sustainable practice are become obvious.

Gravity Media’s approach has been to remind people of the resilience that tools such as remote production can bring. Beyond reducing costs (and carbon) associated with continuously moving people and gear, these can also allow businesses to change direction very quickly.

“There’s been a lot of like reframing over the past year about how sustainability, in some areas, is a dirty word,” said Mitchell. “But if you reframe it to say we’re looking at our business resilience because we want to be here in 20 or 30 years’ time, that operational efficiency is something people can focus on. We’re using technology as a lever, sometimes for the sustainability benefit, but also from a cost efficiency perspective.”

Getting rid of a 747

At its core, motor racing isn’t just about driving fast, it’s about maximum possible efficiency. Putting on races in ten different countries puts Formula E in both a logistical – and maybe ethical – bind. How do you promote sustainability while flying tons of equipment around the world? The challenge has produced a body of experience and knowledge on logistical efficiency.

“We still have to fly stuff around the world. There is this harsh reality,” said Cherowbrier. “Initially, it was all air freight. But what we tried to do was build into our procurement processes the ability to incentivise suppliers to drive down those freight costs. The cash equals the CO2 – it’s no longer a trade off between the two.

“What was missing was the innovation to do that. Normally an engineer would have an idea about how to do it better but that was not getting to the person who needed to sign off ten million quid worth of capex spend.”

‘Twelve years ago, you had to pay extra to be sustainable. Now, what’s good for the planet is normally good for your pocket as well’

Now through partnerships with vendors such as Gravity Media, Tata Communications and Appear to name a few, Cherowbrier says Formula E has been able to keep reinventing its strategy. Initially it was relying on three dedicated 747s to ship the entire global calendar of races. The question was asked: “What if it was two 747s?”

“We got all the suppliers to look at what they’ve got in freight, how much it costs and find out how heavy it is. And then we used a little bit of AI to put that together and then asked what can we get, in the time we have, that gets the most kilograms off a plane for the least amount of money, and does that save us more than a plane?”

The result was a reduction of 60 tons across 12 flights, achieved with the help of willing suppliers who also collaborated with each other.

Collaboration is always presented as being the key to sustainability progress, but it’s often a bigger ask when partners or vendors have to make real world changes. Most organisations aren’t as fully engaged with their collaborators as Formula E and creating change often has to rely on slow and steady communications and the right nudges at the right time.

FIS implemented a peer-to-peer learning initiative, starting with the specific discipline of Nordic Combined skiing which has a smaller ecosystem of 8 to 10 stages for the sport. But those best practices are also shared across the other disciplines.

“My department is open to help everyone inside our ecosystem, as a kind of high-level consultancy company,” said Sieff. “We have seven Olympic disciplines inside, and we cannot treat the ski cross the same as alpine. The difference is huge. We have also to be very careful and help the smallest and give a bit more push to the biggest.”