Nearly all Finnish film and TV content contains ecological themes but most are addressed only fleetingly and focus on activities and behaviours that have little impact on tackling climate change, according to a new study.
Anne Puolanne
The report, titled Ecological Content in Finnish Film and TV, was carried out by Finnish content producers association Audiovisual Producers Finland (APFI) and Häme University of Applied Sciences.
Researchers examined 33 films and 70 TV episodes from 2024 across factual and fiction. It found that 80.6% contained ecological themes, but just 3.9% placed them in a central role.
Moreover, the sustainable themes that featured most were to do with behaviours such as recycling, actions which have been found to have less impact on the carbon emissions of an average person in a Western country such as Finland or the UK than other areas, such as transport, housing and diet.
The research found that sustainable behaviours such as recycling, repairing vehicles and choosing sustainable materials and products accounted for 18% of themes observed by the researchers across all the content reviewed.
On the other hand, sustainable transport references were found in only 8% of the 802 observations noted by researchers, while sustainable housing and energy themes accounted for just 3%, and sustainable climate and environment themes were recorded in just 2%.
Meanwhile, unsustainable consumption, such as single-use items, made up 18% of entries across the themes measured, while unsustainable modes of transport, such as petrol and diesel cars and flying, were noted in 13% of the entries.
The report is described by its authors as “the first to examine how ecological themes appear in Finnish film and TV content” and “likely the first in the world to simultaneously observe and examine both film and TV content through finished works.”
Similar research carried out by US-based non-profit Good Energy and the USC Norman Lear Centre’s Media Impact Project, published in 2022 and called A Glaring Absence, only looked at film TV drama and studied scripts rather than finished content.
The APFI study examined content drawn from Finnish titles pre-selected for consideration by the juries of the Jussi Awards and the Golden Venla Awards. Sixty-eight were in the factual genre, while the remaining 35 were fiction. The titles included films such as the comedy Long Good Thursday and sci-fi drama After Us, the Flood, as well as local versions of international formats Race Across the World and Jeopardy!.
Other key findings of the report included:
• Eco-references appeared in films more than 2.5 times as often as in TV shows (13.4 vs 5.2 per title).
• On average, films had 8.7 sustainability related entries per title, whereas TV episodes had 2.7.
• Sustainable themes were mostly approached indirectly.
• Fiction had more entries overall, with emphasis on indirect approach, than factual, which focused more on a direct approach.
• Sustainable themes were mostly depicted in a neutral way (64%), but sometimes critically (10%) or negatively (5%). However, unsustainable themes were rarely criticised (92.6%).
• Eleven of the 103 titles “had blatant, unsustainable moments that were uncriticised” and unsustainable actions, such as environmental crimes, were “sometimes depicted indifferently or even encouragingly.”
The report was jointly published with a second report, Audience Insights and Impactfulness in Finland 2025. Based on 1,003 responses from viewers in an online panel survey conducted across Finland in January and February, it found that most viewers (54%) are very or fairly concerned about climate change and 48% of them consider presenting climate change and sustainable lifestyles to be very or fairly important. Meanwhile, most of them (52%) “notice if a content features or glorifies unsustainable activities.”
“It’s highly important to understand what types of content we’re making as an industry,” said Anne Puolanne, sustainability manager at the APFI and the co-author of the report with production coordinator Marika Taipalus
“APFI is not promoting that sustainability should be everywhere all at once, but if our industry and the individuals and companies in it decide they want to include the topic in their work, it’s good to understand the bigger picture. For example, now it looks like we’re all about ‘stuff and trash,’ which is not the most relevant topic, if you want to have an impact in this world. It’s really important to also hear that our audiences want [sustainable] topics to be visible, to some extent.”
