European animation is about to get their own environmental report card.
A new European certification program, called ANiMPACT, has begun testing a system that will let animation studios prove they’re producing their work in an environmentally responsible way, something the live-action film industry has been able to do for years.
ANiMPACT is run jointly by three organizations: CineRegio, a network of 53 regional film funds across Europe; Ecoprod, a French nonprofit that has worked on sustainable filmmaking since 2009; and Green Film, a certification system for live-action productions that launched in Italy’s Trentino region in 2017 and has since certified more than 340 films and shows in about a dozen countries. The pilot program officially launched on June 25 at the international animation film festival in Annecy. It follows two years of work and a public feedback period that drew responses from more than 100 organizations in 18 countries.
The idea fills a gap that has existed for as long as environmental certification has been around. Live-action films have had programs like Green Film, the U.K.’s Albert and Ecoprod’s Carbon Clap calculator to measure and certify how eco-friendly a production is. Nothing like that has existed for animation, even though it’s a major part of the film and TV business and, despite appearances, comes with its own environmental cost.
“Animation was kind of left behind from every talk, every discussion, every tool,” said Luca Ferrario, who runs the Trentino Film Commission and helped build both Green Film and ANiMPACT. “But at the same time, it’s a significant part of the film industry. Animation producers were complaining because they were also cut out from the incentives linked to sustainable filming, because they have no way to prove a more sustainable behavior.”
That complaint is what got the project started in 2024, when Ferrario’s team and Ecoprod realized they were each independently trying to solve the same problem. Rather than build separate, competing systems — which is roughly what happened when environmental certification for live-action film first developed differently in Italy, France and Germany — the groups decided to design one shared European standard from the start, working together with CineRegio.
Oscar-nominated European animated film ‘Little Amelie’
Maybe Movies/Ikki Films
“With live action, we started in this way, and France started in that way, and then Germany did their thing, so now it’s a mess,” says Ferrario. “With animation we wanted be on the same page from the beginning.”
Figuring out how to measure animation’s environmental impact turned out to be harder than doing the same for live action, mostly because almost no one had tried before. The only existing tool anywhere that covered animation was a French calculator, now called Carbulator, built by the industry group Anim’France. The environmental impact of animation is also harder to measure because a single project is often split across many different studios, countries and outside vendors, rather than handled by one production crew in one place.
“What is complicated about animation is that it is often fragmented across different players, different companies, different countries,” Ferrario said. “This is what makes it more complicated to manage.”
A single animation feature also takes much longer, usually many years, to complete, making it harder to measure total environmental impact.
While Live-action shoots tend to produce much of their emissions from travel and location filming, in animation, the single biggest environmental cost comes from computers: the electricity used to run the workstations and servers that power rendering and other digital work. Ferrario said electricity alone accounts for roughly half of a typical production’s environmental impact, with the rest coming from things like how long computer equipment lasts before it’s replaced, digital data storage, and, for bigger international co-productions, travel between studios in different countries.
That focus on electricity also extends to artificial intelligence, which is now being introduced throughout animation production — not just for generating images, but for rendering, workflow automation and other behind-the-scenes tasks that consume significant computing power. For the moment, ANiMPACT is simply asking companies to adopt a basic set of ethical and environmental guidelines around the technology, but Ferrario expects environmental requirements to be updated as AI use in animation grows.
The certification system itself is built around seven broad areas: how a company is run and its social responsibility practices; its office buildings and energy use; its digital workflow and data storage; travel; food; merchandise; and how it communicates about sustainability. Studios can be assessed both as individual projects and as companies, and each standard is weighted by how much environmental impact it actually has, with some counting as required and others as optional extra credit.
“The first thing to say is that we can measure the impact, and then we can reduce it, because just measuring doesn’t mean you’re reducing anything,” Ferrario said.
Latvian film ‘Flow’, winner of the 2025 Oscar for Best Animated Feature
Janus Films/Courtesy Everett Collection
For studios and producers, the main reason to bother with certification, aside from saving the planet, is money. A growing number of public film funds, at the regional, national and European level, now offer financial incentives for productions that can prove they’re environmentally responsible and some are starting to make it a requirement rather than a bonus. That shift has already changed how live-action productions are budgeted and planned, and organizers expect the same to happen in animation. Ferrario said the key is that a real certification, unlike a company simply claiming to be sustainable, requires an outside auditor to check the work.
“Many funds are asking for a certification, or are giving incentive for certification, and this is happening at regional level, at national level, at European level,” he said. “And they only way you can call it a proper certification is when there is a third-party verification. So it’s not us, it’s not the producer, it’s someone else, someone independent, checking and verifying. That’s very important for public funding.”
The project’s backers are also pitching it as a fix for how messy environmental certification got in live-action film, where different countries built their own separate systems that don’t always line up with each other. ANiMPACT has been endorsed by a broad range o industry groups, including Animation Europe, Cartoon Italia, CEE Animation, Anim’France and Cartoon, and CineRegio’s network of regional funds gives it built-in reach across the continent.
ANiMPACT’s pilot phase runs through May 2027. Organizers hope to have a finalized version of the standards ready by that summer, at which point any animation production would be able to apply for certification. Even though it’s still technically a test run, certifications being issued now are treated as fully real, backed by the same outside audits and verification the permanent program will use.
“Even though it is a pilot test, it’s a real certification with a real verification, auditing and everything,” Ferrario said. “It’s been up and working since the end of June.”
Demand has been higher than organizers expected. In the first month after the pilot launched, ANiMPACT received about 40 requests from productions in multiple countries wanting to take part, on top of a public statement of support signed by more than 90 studios, producers and other organizations. To qualify, a production has to be finished, or far enough along in production, by June 2027.
Alongside the certification program, Ecoprod and Eurimages, the European co-production support fund, have also launched a free online course on “Green Animation” through a training platform called StepUP, meant to help people in the industry understand animation’s environmental impact and learn how to apply the new standards.