When flooding strikes, it can devastate vast areas, taking lives, homes and possessions with it.
Multiple factors affect the scale of the social and economic damage that flooding causes, such as climate change, land-use change and the flood protection measures in place.
In a new study, published in Science Advances, my colleagues and I attempt to disentangle the factors contributing to more than 1,700 floods in Europe over 1950-2020.
Our findings show that there has been an overall reduction in deaths and economic damage over this 70-year period – even though population and economic growth means the maximum value of possible losses has increased.
This is linked to the extent to which society has adapted to climate change.
Our study finds that – in most regions – flood impacts have been affected primarily by direct human actions, such as land-use change, vulnerability reduction and catchment alteration, rather than long-term changes to river levels or sea levels.
Other factors, including climate change and alterations to river catchments, had an important role in certain places, but were not a factor on a continent-wide scale.
What influences flood losses?
Dozens of floods occur in Europe every year, though the magnitude of the socioeconomic impacts they cause varies considerably from year to year.
Floods can happen in any country, though they are less common in north-eastern Europe, especially since climate change has reduced snow cover and, hence, reduced spring snowmelt. In the hot and mountainous south of Europe, flash floods are a major risk, causing most fatalities in Europe. In north-western Europe the risk of coastal flooding, increased by global sea level rise, is higher than in other parts of the continent.
Our study looks at 1,729 floods that took place across Europe over a 70 year-period, drawn from the Historical Analysis of Natural Hazards in Europe (HANZE) database. We estimate that this list covers the vast majority of all flood impacts in Europe since 1950.
We find that, in absolute terms, direct economic damage from floods in Europe has increased considerably, from an estimated €37bn in the 1950s (at 2020 prices) to €92bn in the 2000s and €71bn in 2010s.
Yet, in relative terms, the annual losses from floods have fallen. Direct economic damage from floods fell to 0.04% of Europe’s gross domestic product (GDP) in the 2010s, down from 0.11% in the 1950s.
Meanwhile, the risk of dying in a flood has also declined more than six-fold since the 1950s.
Six long-term drivers
First, it is worth noting that each of the 1,729 events in our study were the result of a unique combination of natural and socioeconomic factors under various flood management regimes.
However, we can explore how trends in economic and social damages from floods across Europe have been influenced by different drivers. For this, we turn to the evolving science of attribution research.
Extreme weather attribution research covers a diverse set of qualitative and quantitative approaches to estimate the contribution of individual drivers – such as climate change or socioeconomic factors – to observed impacts. Most studies focus on attribution to climate change, but such approaches are often insufficient to explain the magnitude of flood losses.
Our study investigates six long-term drivers that could have explained the trends in flood impacts in Europe over a 70-year period. These are:
- Long-term climate change
- Human interventions in river catchments
- Population and economic growth
- Land-use change
- Flood protection levels
- Flood vulnerability
To do so, we use hydrological and socioeconomic models driven by observations of climate, economic and other trends.
In all cases, we evaluate the drivers against the climate and socioeconomic conditions of the year 1950 to capture how their importance might have changed over time.
The first driver we look at – and the one that is typically of most interest in attribution studies – is long-term changes to the climate. This includes changes in the probability of extreme river discharges, storm surges, wave heights and global sea level rise.
The study looks at both the fingerprint of human-caused climate change – the 1950-2020 period is when most of global warming has occurred – but also incorporates natural variations of the climate.
Here, we find climate change has mostly worsened flood impacts, especially for levels of economic damage.
However, there is strong variation in Europe. While climate change has led to more substantial flood impacts in north-west Europe, the inverse was true for several countries in southern Europe. This is largely due to an increase in the dryness of the climate.
Human factors
Next we look at human interventions in river catchments, such as reservoir construction and land-use change, which alter the movement and distribution of water across large areas.
Here, we find that these interventions had opposite effects.
Across Europe, land-use change contributed to larger flood impacts over the study period. This was largely due to a rapid increase in “soil sealing” – the covering of soil for housing, roads or other construction work.
However, the construction of large reservoirs – most of which were built after 1950 – has reduced flood volumes, helping to reduce flood impacts, particularly in central Europe.
Population growth has increased flood impacts in almost all countries (with the main exception being Germany because of population decline in the east of the country). In addition, economic growth means the maximum value of possible losses to floods – or “flood exposure” – has increased across the continent.
That said, when considering losses relative to the size of the economy or population, the change in spatial distribution of people becomes more important.
For example, there has been more development in floodplains than outside of them, which – when combined with structural factors, such as the shift from agriculture to industry and from industry to services – has contributed to an overall increase in flood impacts.
However, this did not occur in all countries and did not apply to fatalities, which narrowly reduced across Europe over the study period due to changes in population distribution.
Adaptation
The final two drivers investigated were related to how society has adapted to flood risks.
One method is improving structural flood protection through dykes and reservoirs. (In a 2024 study, we estimated that flood protection has improved in Europe since 1950, even if more for coastal than river floods.)
We also see this effect in this study, though it is not as pronounced. This is because we only look at floods that did occur – meaning that protection measures were not sufficient to prevent them.
Nonetheless, we find that better protection has reduced the extent and, therefore, the impact of floods in most European countries, except some in central and northern Europe.
Our final driver was vulnerability to floods, defined as the relative impact of flooding on population and assets at a given hydrological intensity.
This factor heavily depends on the level of preparedness and adaptation as well as the capacity to respond to a flood. For instance, small adaptations of buildings that prevent water from flowing into it could substantially reduce the share of the building value that is lost in the flood.
In the most recent decade, floods caused an estimated 74-75% fewer fatalities and smaller economic loss than if they happened in 1950 at the same level of exposure – thanks to lower vulnerability. This reduction was found across the continent – indicating that certain universal changes were responsible for this process.
Our study was not able to link this progress to individual measures, but obvious candidates are creation of early warning systems, more capable emergency services, improved disaster response and uptake of private precautionary measures by households and companies after previous experiences of flooding.
The figure below shows the contribution of the six drivers (from left to right) for three types of impacts: fatalities (top), population affected (middle) and economic losses (bottom) to all floods that have occurred in each country between 1950 and 2020.
The shading indicates whether the driver increased (red) or decreased (blue) impacts.
Attribution of contribution to impacts (in rows) of different drivers (A to F), by country, expressed as percent change, relative to the counterfactual scenario of no change in the individual driver since 1950. Source: Paprotny, D et al. (2025)
Solutions reaching their limit?
Our findings indicate the crucial role that adaptation has had on containing growth in flood losses that could have been induced by a larger population and economy.
Still, this positive development should not be taken for granted. Our results show a considerable slowdown in the reduction of losses from better flood protection or lower levels of vulnerability in the most recent two decades. This could indicate that existing solutions are reaching their limits.
However, we find that southern and eastern Europe still has higher vulnerability compared with western Europe – showing potential for further improvements in those regions.
Recent major floods, such as the 2021 event in western Europe, have raised questions about existing levels of preparedness, while highlighting the role of climate change in increasing the impacts of those events.
Our study shows that adaptation works in Europe, but that greater efforts will be needed to ensure it continues to do so.
The post Guest post: How adaptation has cut flood deaths and losses in Europe appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Guest post: How adaptation has cut flood deaths and losses in Europe
Greenhouse Gases
DeBriefed 5 September 2025: Pakistan floods hit 1.8m people; UK ‘eco-populism’; How warming threatens a man-made lake
Welcome to Carbon Brief’s DeBriefed.
An essential guide to the week’s key developments relating to climate change.
This week
Pakistan and India floods
EXTREME WEATHER: Heavy flooding forced half a million people to evacuate their homes in just 24 hours in Pakistan’s Punjab this week, the Associated Press reported. It brings the total number of people displaced since last month to 1.8 million, the newswire said. According to Arab News, at least 41 people have died as a result of the flooding since last week. The flooding has also destroyed thousands of acres of crops in Punjab, a province that accounts for 68% of Pakistan’s total annual food grain production, Bloomberg reported.
CROSS-BORDER EVENT: Meanwhile, in Indian Punjab, “at least 30 people have died and more than 354,000 have been affected” by flooding, BBC News reported. India also warned Pakistan about more cross-border flooding for the second time in as many weeks, as both countries reeled from monsoon rains, the Associated Press reported.
UK dividing lines
NEW FACE: Zack Polanski has been elected as the new leader of the Green Party of England and Wales in a landslide victory, the Financial Times reported. Polanski is an “outspoken campaigner who has argued his party needs to ‘connect with people’s anger’ and become more combative against ‘villains’, including oil major Shell and the ‘super-rich’”, the newspaper said. Polanksi wants to “replace” the ruling Labour party on a platform of “eco-populism”, according to BBC News.
NORTH SEA OIL: Meanwhile, the UK Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch pledged to drill “all” of the remaining oil and gas in the North Sea if elected, BBC News reported. [The Conservatives are polling third, at 17%.] In response to the speech, the Daily Telegraph‘s world economy editor Ambrose Evans-Pritchard argued that Badenoch’s plan would not “raise this country’s long-term output of oil and gas by more than homeopathic amounts” nor “move the needle on UK energy prices” (more below).
Around the world
- HIGHER AMBITIONS: The UN urged countries to set new, more ambitious national climate plans this month, ahead of this year’s COP30 summit in Belém, Brazil, Reuters reported.
- ‘JUNK SCIENCE’: A group of more than 85 climate scientists released a “scathing review” of the Trump administration’s misleading climate report, DeSmog reported.
- FOSSIL ENERGY: Russia said China had agreed to a massive new pipeline capable of importing as much as 50bn cubic metres of gas a year, the Financial Times reported.
- US PRESSURE: Reuters reported that the US is pressuring other countries to reject a UN deal on cutting emissions from shipping by threatening them with tariffs, visa restrictions and port levies.
- SWELTERING HEAT: Authorities in Japan and South Korea said 2025 was the hottest summer in their countries since records began, Al Jazeera reported.
- MITIGATION WORK: According to Bloomberg, Zimbabwe has published draft regulations to establish a National Climate Fund. The fund will finance projects “aimed at mitigating the impact of climate change and respond[ing] to emergencies”.
20%
The amount by which clean-energy production has surged in India this year, according to Reuters, citing data from the thinktank Ember.
Latest climate research
- “Extreme cold surges” have “robustly weakened in middle-to-high latitude continents during autumn and winter” due to climate change, according to a study in Nature Communications.
- A study published in npj Climate Action found that exposing people to moral appeals results in overall carbon footprint reduction and increased participation in civic and political climate action, regardless of ideological affiliation.
- The World Bank’s increase in climate finance spending since the Paris Agreement has been driven by projects with “low climate components”, according to a study in Climatic Change.
(For more, see Carbon Brief’s in-depth daily summaries of the top climate news stories on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.)
Captured
A claim that gas produced in the North Sea emits “four times” less CO2 than imported liquified natural gas (LNG) featured prominently in both the Guardian and the Daily Telegraph this week, following Badenoch’s pledge to drill “all” the remaining oil and gas in the UK. However, this figure is highly misleading. It only refers to the emissions that come from the process of extracting and delivering the gas, which are much smaller than those from burning it. When both extraction and burning of the gas are taken into account, CO2 emissions from UK production are only around 15% lower than those from LNG imports, according to a new factcheck from Carbon Brief.
Spotlight
A man-made lake threatened by climate change
This week, Carbon Brief reports on how climate change is impacting the sustainability of a scenic nature reserve in the southern US.
In 1941, as World War 2 thickened, the US Congress approved a plan to construct a reservoir storage project on the Hiwassee River, a water body that cuts across the states of Georgia, North Carolina and Tennessee.
The dam, which came to be known as Chatuge after an 18th-century Cherokee village, was originally built for power generation purposes. However, after it was completed, it became more than a hydroelectric project.
In May 1942, the Towns County Lions Club started stocking fish in the newly created Lake Chatuge. In 1944, Clay County leased a tract of land for a public park.
Today, the park offers “scenic mountain views” and “panoramic views” of Lake Chatuge. The lake is also home to rare, endangered plant species and is an important source of drinking water.
However, Lake Chatuge’s future has been plunged into uncertainty after the Tennessee Valley Authority proposed a plan to repair the dam’s spillway, which could involve draining the lake’s water levels by 20 feet (6m) for up to eight years.
The TVA’s action is largely forward-thinking. While the dam and its spillway are in good condition, the public utility company is wary of extreme weather events made more likely by climate change.
In September 2024, Hurricane Helene tore through parts of Georgia and North Carolina, leaving more than 128 people dead across the US and uprooting communities in its wake. One analysis estimated that 44% of the economic damage from the storm can be attributed to human-caused climate change.
The Lake Chatuge area was largely spared, but officials worry that the next extreme weather event may not be far off.
“It’s the kind of event – the unusual storm event that can happen, that’s pretty rare – is what we’re looking out for,” a TVA project manager has said.
Meanwhile, aside from the imminent repairs made more likely by the increased possibility of extreme weather events, Lake Chatuge is also battling a parrot feather infestation, a phenomenon involving the spread of an invasive plant that has been linked to global warming in other parts of the US.
Saving Lake Chatuge
The threat posed by climate change to Lake Chatuge is not an isolated case. A July 2025 report by researchers at Utah State University found that climate change is affecting the social benefits of dams across the country.
Elsewhere in the world, the impact of extreme weather on ageing dams is wide ranging, including recently heightening tensions between India and Pakistan.
However, community members in the Lake Chatuge area are not giving up easily. A Facebook group dedicated to saving the lake has more than 2,000 members.
“Lake Chatuge is our economy,” Towns County’s sole commissioner, Cliff Bradshaw, told Carbon Brief. He added:
“The main attraction to this area is Lake Chatuge. Without the lake, the county’s tourism would drop, and our economy would suffer greatly – could even drive the county into a depression – as we have a great deal of businesses that rely solely on activities on Lake Chatuge for their customers, such as marinas, party boats and water activity playgrounds. The other businesses in town may not rely on the lake for customers, but do rely on the tourist traffic brought into the area by the lake to drive customers into their place of business.”
According to reporting by the Atlanta-Journal Constitution, visitors have spent up to $100m annually in the area since 2021.
The TVA’s repair work could begin as soon as 2027, but community members are asking both the public utility company and political leaders to help find the least damaging pathway.
Watch, read, listen
SCIENCE CUTS: The Financial Times reported on how the Trump administration has “gutted” the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema), throwing into doubt the nation’s ability to respond to extreme weather disasters.
SUSTAINABLE ECONOMICS: In an interview with Le Monde, the French economist Thomas Piketty argued that protecting the planet from climate change requires wealth redistribution.
TWEAKING NATURE: A Havard atmospheric chemist and an Oxford planetary physicist discussed the nuances and subtleties of geoengineering on the podcast Entanglements by Undark.
Coming up
- 8 September: Norway election
- 8-12 September: 54th Pacific Islands Forum Leaders Meeting, Honoraria, Solomon Islands
- 9-23 September: 80th Session of the UN General Assembly, New York
Pick of the jobs
- Energy UK, policy manager | Salary: £38,450. Location: London
- CNN Digital, climate and weather editor | Salary: $91,000-$169,000. Location: Atlanta, Washington DC, New York, Chicago or Burbank, California
- The Post and Courier, rising waters reporter | Salary: Unknown. Location: South Carolina, US
- The Seattle Times, climate reporter | Salary: $75,000-$90,000. Location: Seattle, US
DeBriefed is edited by Daisy Dunne. Please send any tips or feedback to debriefed@carbonbrief.org.
This is an online version of Carbon Brief’s weekly DeBriefed email newsletter. Subscribe for free here.
The post DeBriefed 5 September 2025: Pakistan floods hit 1.8m people; UK ‘eco-populism’; How warming threatens a man-made lake appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Greenhouse Gases
Debriefed 12 September 2025: Africa calls for promised finance; Deadly heat linked to big oil; How to tackle net-zero backlash
Welcome to Carbon Brief’s DeBriefed.
An essential guide to the week’s key developments relating to climate change.
This week
Africa’s second climate summit
‘NOT CHARITY’: At the second Africa climate summit held in Addis Ababa in Ethiopia this week, leaders “chastised developed nations for failing to honor [climate finance] pledges” and said they will “tap the private sector” to help fill the gap, Bloomberg reported. In a joint statement, African leaders said that providing climate finance is “a legal obligation and not charity, as anchored in the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and its Paris Agreement”, according to the outlet.
SOLUTIONS CENTRED: Climate Home News reported that Ethiopian president Taye Atske Selassie told the closing ceremony on Wednesday the summit had repositioned Africa “not as victims of a crisis it never created but as a global centre for climate solution, renewable energy and green growth”. The outlet added that the joint leaders’ declaration called for “strengthened and sustained support” to scale up African-led climate initiatives, such as the 8,000km Great Green Wall across the Sahel and the African Forest Landscape Restoration Initiative.
Around the world
- ‘SILLY’: Chris Wright, the climate-sceptic US energy secretary, has dismissed the impacts of climate change as “not incredibly important” and described the Paris Agreement as “silly”, reported the New York Times. Elsewhere, the group of “climate contrarians” behind Trump’s misleading climate report have been “disbanded” following a lawsuit challenging their appointment, CNN reported.
- CHINA BOOM: The world’s fossil-fuel use could begin to drop by 2030 as a result of China’s “rapid adoption of renewables and its increasing reliance on electricity”, Bloomberg reported, citing a new study by thinktank Ember.
- NDC INDECISION: EU member states are still “wrangling” over the bloc’s overdue 2035 climate target, “with no sign of agreement”, according to a leaked draft text seen by the Guardian.
- TRADE SPOTLIGHT: Brazil plans to propose a new forum for governments to discuss how climate policy affects trade at the next World Trade Organization meeting next week, according to Reuters.
- UK PUBLIC POLLED: In a frontpage story, the Times covered new polling it commissioned, reporting that the number of people who think the dangers of global warming are exaggerated has increased by more than 50% in the past four years, from 16% to 25%. [Polling experts have criticised the framing of the Times coverage, noting that a large majority of the public still back net-zero.]
£797 million
The record amount of UK climate aid spent on nature last year – largely due to an increase in spending on carbon offsets, according to new Carbon Brief analysis.
Latest climate research
- Disadvantaged communities in the US are eating more sugar as temperatures rise | Nature Climate Change
- Videos of climate scientists making personal appeals for climate action were more likely to motivate viewers to act if the messengers were “older, male [and] attractive” | PLOS One
- Carbon-credit purchases for major airlines often come at the expense of funding other decarbonisation measures | Nature Communications
(For more, see Carbon Brief’s in-depth daily summaries of the top climate news stories on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.)
Captured
A new study used “extreme event attribution” to assess the impact of climate change on all 21st-century heatwaves that were classified as “major disasters”. It found that global warming linked to the world’s biggest 180 oil and gas companies made all 213 heatwaves analysed more intense and frequent. Meanwhile, one-quarter of the heatwaves would have been “virtually impossible” without human-caused global warming. The paper, covered by Carbon Brief, analysed 213 heatwaves over 2000-23 that were recorded in the EM-DAT database of “major disasters” . These heatwaves are shown in the map above.
Spotlight
How scientists can tackle net-zero backlash
This week, Carbon Brief asks climate scientists attending a summit at the University of East Anglia, UK how researchers can better combat net-zero misinformation.
It comes as the UK’s right-wing political parties and press are increasingly making misleading claims about net-zero.
Asher Minns, executive director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research at the University of East Anglia
The whole discourse around net-zero has become something that it was never intended to be. It’s a quite specific scientific concept that came out of the IPCC 1.5C report, following up on [the] Paris [Agreement], so it actually has quite a specific definition, but it has actually become a phrase that is being used really just to mean “removing CO2” or “saving energy”, even. It’s become this kind of huge term across public, across media, across policy, that everybody can just pin what they mean to “net-zero” without actually referring to what it actually is, which is absolute zero emissions, getting CO2 out of the atmosphere. The fact that there is a government department called “net-zero” isn’t great for that public discourse, for public understanding, and that’s why we’ve got a bit of a backlash. I don’t think we need to necessarily abandon the phrase net-zero, but I think we should just talk about clean energy and concepts that people have a chance of hanging onto, rather than something that’s really quite difficult.
Prof Corinne Le Quéré, Royal Society research professor of climate change science at the University of East Anglia
I think narratives about the way that we present climate action can be very negative, and, in fact, we do climate action all the time. We’ve cut emissions by half in the UK and most people haven’t realised that this is happening. Just talking about climate change in the way that there are things that you can do that are desirable and have benefits for you. Of course, the government needs to make climate solutions accessible to everybody. But improving the narratives about how we talk about climate change, that would be, for me, a small thing that we could do.
Prof Hayley Fowler, professor of climate change impacts at Newcastle University
I don’t think we can do it alone. I think we try to do everything alone and I don’t think that’s the right approach. My personal opinion is we need to be collaborating with key influencers and celebrities, quite honestly, who can actually get that message across to the people who need to hear that message. I think we need probably a few key spokespeople. And I don’t think they should be scientists, but they should have simple and clear scientific messages that they convey. There’s lots of misinformation and it’s conveyed in very clear ways with simple messaging. Often climate science is really, really complicated and that’s why people just don’t understand it, they don’t understand the jargon surrounding it and, therefore, perhaps they are more likely to understand the simple messages that come from the climate deniers.
Dr Ruth Wood, senior lecturer in environment and climate change at the University of Manchester
I find it quite challenging to work out how to engage in those discussions because they’re taking place in forums that I’m not at. Do we need a groundswell of voices around supporting net-zero, which have the same level of media savviness of the anti net-zero groups? If we had their same ability to mobilise and get the message out there, maybe that would counter some of their narratives. The gap between science and communication is a huge challenge.
Prof Charlie Wilson, professor of energy and climate change and senior research fellow in the Environmental Change Institute at the University of Oxford
I guess that part of the answer is how we’ve always done it, which is forceful rebuttals and corrections with appropriate evidence. The second bit is like learning how the algorithms work to promote both information, as well as misinformation. This misinformation is being amplified by algorithmic preferences expressed through social media platforms, which emphasise juicy clickbait-type stuff.
Watch, read, listen
FIXING TOMORROW: Climate scientist Dr Kimberly Nicholas and the NGO Project Drawdown released an evidence-based online guide for how individuals can take actions to address climate change.
‘WAR ON SCIENCE’: Bloomberg had a special feature on how Donald Trump’s “war on science” is crippling the US.
CLIMATE IN COURT: The New York Times unpacked how and why a group of students from the Pacific Islands took a climate case to the International Court of Justice.
Coming up
- 9-23 September: 80th session of the UN general assembly, New York
- 16 September: Malawi elections
- 19 September: First technical session of the UN Environment Programme working group on nitrogen, online
Pick of the jobs
- Floodlight, editor-in-chief | Salary: $130,000. Location: Remote (US)
- University of Birmingham, research fellow in climate intervention | Salary: £36,636-£46,049. Location: Birmingham, UK
- Climate Group, communications coordinator | Salary: 695,800-850,000 rupees. Location: New Delhi, India
- Wired, senior writer, science frontiers | Salary: Unknown. Location: London
DeBriefed is edited by Daisy Dunne. Please send any tips or feedback to debriefed@carbonbrief.org.
This is an online version of Carbon Brief’s weekly DeBriefed email newsletter. Subscribe for free here.
The post Debriefed 12 September 2025: Africa calls for promised finance; Deadly heat linked to big oil; How to tackle net-zero backlash appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Artificial intelligence (AI) has undergone a rapid expansion in recent years.
Tech leaders have hailed an “AI revolution” – predicting “transformative” effects for humanity – while some governments have set their sights on AI-driven economic growth.
Yet, the industry is also facing scrutiny on many fronts, from inaccuracies in AI outputs through to the threat it poses to democracy.
One major critique concerns the environmental impact of AI, particularly the intensive energy use and carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions of the data centres that power it.
Campaigners, journalists and researchers have warned that the rapid expansion of data centres could slow down or even reverse the global shift towards net-zero.
The topic is complex, not least because the future of AI – and the role it could play in increasing or potentially helping to reduce emissions – remains highly uncertain.
Below, Carbon Brief takes a look at some of the best available figures, largely from the International Energy Agency (IEA), to explore the energy and emissions impact of AI.
- Data centres currently account for a small share of global emissions and electricity use
- Around a tenth of the electricity demand growth by 2030 is set to be driven by data centres
- Data centres could account for half of electricity demand growth in some countries
- Fossil-fuel use will likely expand to power data centres, but clean-energy supplies are set to grow faster
- There is a lot of uncertainty about how much data centres will expand
1. Data centres currently account for a small share of global emissions and electricity use
The process of training and deploying AI models relies on data centres – large, energy-intensive facilities that house computing infrastructure.
Data centres already underpin the internet, among other things, making them essential for modern life. But as hype around AI has grown in recent years, investment in new data centres has ballooned.
The global electricity consumption of expanding data centres has grown by around 12% each year since 2017, according to the IEA’s recent “energy and AI” report.
Concerns about “skyrocketing” electricity demand have also prompted warnings of data centres driving up CO2 emissions, as fossil fuels still generate much of the world’s power.
Indeed, companies, such as Google, Meta and Microsoft, have reported large emissions spikes over the past few years due to data-centre expansion, despite their net-zero pledges.
One research paper concludes that the electricity demand of AI “runs counter to the massive efficiency gains that are needed to achieve net-zero”. Others have voiced concerns that data centres will “overwhelm” and “undermine” both national and company-level climate targets.
Reporting often mentions the electricity demand of data centres – or their emissions – “doubling”, “tripling” or increasing by some other large percentage in the coming years.
But these increases, while potentially dramatic in relative terms, are starting from a low baseline. As shown in the chart below, data centres are currently responsible for just over 1% of global electricity demand and 0.5% of CO2 emissions, according to IEA data.
Given this starting point, even as data centres expand, the IEA suggests that they will make a relatively small contribution to climate change, in the short term.
The agency estimates that data-centre emissions will reach 1% of CO2 emissions by 2030 in its central scenario, or 1.4% in a faster-growth scenario.
Nevertheless, it notes that this is one of the few sectors where emissions are set to grow – alongside road transport and aviation – as most will likely decarbonise in the coming years.
2. Around a tenth of the electricity demand growth by 2030 is set to be driven by data centres
The world is entering what the IEA describes as a “new age of electricity”, in which the electrification of transport, buildings and industry drives a surge in demand for power.
Along with electric cars and factories, data centres are frequently highlighted by analysts as a key “emerging driver” of this demand.
Under the IEA’s central scenario for data-centre growth, the sector’s global electricity consumption would more than double between 2024 and 2030, reaching 945 terawatt-hours (TWh) by the end of the decade. This is equivalent to the current electricity demand of Japan.
The IEA describes AI as “the most important driver of this growth”.
As it stands, AI has been responsible for around 5-15% of data-centre power use in recent years, but this could increase to 35-50% by 2030, according to another report prepared for the IEA.
However, the 530TWh rise in electricity demand in data centres by 2030 would only be 8% of the overall increase in demand that the IEA projects, as shown in the chart below.
This is less than electric vehicles (838TWh) or air conditioning (651TWh). It is considerably less than the 1,936TWh growth expected in industrial sectors by 2030.
If data-centre electricity use rose in line with the IEA’s faster-growth scenario, the facilities would be responsible for around 12% of global demand growth overall.
While the IEA says “uncertainties widen” when considering electricity demand growth beyond 2030, it expects a continued – albeit slower – increase to 1,193TWh by 2035.
This would mean annual demand growth roughly halving, from around 90TWh per year out to 2030, down to less than 50TWh a year out to 2035.
3. Data centres could account for half of electricity demand growth in some countries
While the global picture suggests a relatively modest role for data centres in driving near-future electricity demand growth, it could be far more pronounced in some countries.
Data centres are very geographically concentrated, both in terms of their global distribution and within leading countries. Today, nearly half of their electricity consumption takes place in the US, 25% in China and 15% in Europe, according to the IEA.
US data centres used around 4% of the nation’s electricity in 2023 and this is set to rise to 7-12% by 2028, according to analysis by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
In Ireland – regarded as a European “tech hub” – around 21% of the nation’s electricity is used for data centres. The IEA estimates that this share could rise to 32% by 2026.
Data-centre electricity demand tends to be further localised in certain regions. In the US state of Virginia, these facilities already consume 26% of electricity, while in the Irish capital, Dublin, the figure is 79%, according to analysis by Oeko-Institute.
Much of the commentary on AI threatening climate goals comes from “advanced economies” in the global north, where the IEA estimates that, on average, a quarter of electricity demand growth by 2030 will be driven by data centres.
(In many of these countries, electricity demand has previously been flat or falling for years.)
Roughly half of the power demand growth in the US and Japan over the next five years is expected to come from data centres, according to the IEA, as shown in the figure below.
While there are some notable exceptions, such as Malaysia, data centres are set to be a relatively small portion of electricity demand growth in developing and emerging markets.
Around the world, electricity grids are under strain, with many developed countries, in particular, seeing long wait times for grid connections and new transmission lines. Data-centre growth is raising this pressure.
There are also growing concerns, notably in the US, about the impact data-centre growth could have on energy bills.
The IEA says that demand growth presents “advanced economies” with a “wake-up call” for the electricity sector to invest in infrastructure, otherwise “there is a risk that meeting data-centre load growth could entail trade-offs with other goals, such as electrification”.
4. Fossil-fuel use will likely expand to power data centres, but clean-energy supplies are set to grow faster
The extent to which data-centre growth increases emissions depends on which energy sources power those data centres.
Data centres can use power from the grid, in which case their electricity mix will reflect that of the region they are in and could therefore become cleaner as nations decarbonise.
They can also be powered by “captive” sources, built to supply specific facilities, such as solar panels, small nuclear reactors or gas turbines.
There are concerns that data-centre expansion will be used to justify the prolonged use of fossil fuels, “locking in” a future of elevated emissions.
Indeed, the likes of Shell have framed AI in such terms and some data-centre operators have been explicitly seeking gas connections to meet their electricity needs.
Currently, coal is the biggest single electricity source for data centres globally, largely due to the numerous facilities in China.
Overall, fossil fuels provide nearly 60% of power to data centres, according to the IEA. Renewables meet 27% of their electricity demand and nuclear another 15%.
(These figures are based on the electricity these facilities consume, rather than any contracts they have to buy clean energy credits.)
In the IEA’s central scenario, by 2035 the ratio of the data-centre electricity mix switches from around 60% fossil fuels and 40% clean power to 60% clean power and 40% fossil fuels, as shown in the chart below.
This is expected to be driven primarily by the wider global expansion of renewables, although some projects will be funded directly by data-centre companies.
However, the IEA says significantly more gas and coal power would likely still be required to meet data-centre demand, both from ramping up existing plants and building new ones.
Gas-power generation for data centres is expected to more than double from 120TWh in 2024 to 293TWh in 2035, with much of this growth in the US, according to the IEA.
About 38GW of captive gas plants currently “in development” – roughly a quarter of all such projects – are planned to power data centres, according to Global Energy Monitor (GEM).
The US has doubled the amount of gas- and oil-fired capacity it has in development over the past year, driven partly by the energy demand of the “burgeoning AI industry”, according to GEM.
However, these projects are facing long lead times and “sharply” rising costs, with GEM noting, as a result, that many may never materialise.
5. There is a lot of uncertainty about how much data centres will expand
Currently, there are no comprehensive global datasets available on data-centre electricity consumption or emissions, with few governments mandating any reporting of such numbers.
All figures concerning the energy and climate impact of AI are therefore estimates.
The IEA has assessed hundreds of available estimates and forecasts, noting that even historical data can be “widely divergent”, due in part to a lack of common definitions.
On top of this, there are major uncertainties, including over how quickly AI will be adopted. Despite the enthusiastic uptake of generative AI by individuals and companies, some argue that the business case for continued, rapid growth may be weaker than suggested.
Another uncertainty is how energy-efficient AI will be. Experts have already identified efficiency improvements resulting from better chips, more efficient training algorithms and larger data centres, all of which could continue curbing electricity demand.
(Google has also reported a substantial drop in the electricity use required for individual AI search queries, which is already small compared to the power needed to train AI models.)
A final uncertainty is over how many proposed data centres will actually get built, with some speculative requests for grid capacity relating to plans that may never materialise.
As a result of these knowledge gaps, there have been numerous estimates of short-term electricity demand growth from data centres, which have produced very different results, as shown in the chart below.
Some estimates – such as one from the Gas Exporting Countries Forum arguing that more gas exports will be needed to fuel meteoric rises in electricity demand for AI – have been deemed less credible in reviews by independent experts.
Another area of great uncertainty concerns the impact that the application of AI could have on electricity use and emissions.
Some researchers have attempted to calculate how much AI could curb emissions, by helping to identify efficiency gains in other parts of the energy system, or by making technological breakthroughs.
In some “exploratory” analysis, the IEA says such gains could cancel out any extra data-centre emissions due to the growth of AI.
However, it adds that despite the AI hype, “there is currently no existing momentum of AI adoption that would unlock these emissions reductions”.
The post AI: Five charts that put data-centre energy use – and emissions – into context appeared first on Carbon Brief.
AI: Five charts that put data-centre energy use – and emissions – into context
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