Caroline Lucas

speaker

487 appearances 6 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 13 Aug

Caroline Lucas’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 6 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 4.

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The Rest Is Politics · Data Centres vs. Drinking Water: What Matters To Us Most? · 30 Jul 2026 podcast

Now water scarcity is often called a threat multiplier.

And right now it's contributing to food insecurity, it's deepening economic crises, exacerbating social and geopolitical tensions, and potentially fueling conflict.

So in this episode, we'll be asking, when does a drought stop being a humanitarian crisis and start being a security threat?

Could we really go to war over water?

And is the AI race about to make our water crisis even worse?

For the UK, the real danger isn't just a tap running dry at home.

It's systemic.

As we heard last week, the UK leans heavily on climate-vulnerable nations to keep us fed.

So when water crises hit overseas, the shockwaves reach our supermarket shelves.

That's precisely the kind of cascading risk flagged in the second suppressed government report that we've discussed on this series.

this time from the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, DEFRA, on the UK's critical systems.

It reveals that water scarcity isn't some distant threat.

It's already here.

15% of our surface water and 27% of our groundwater aquifers are being drained faster than nature can refill them.

And that, of course, will only be exacerbated by new water-intensive industries, like the spread of data centres to feed the booming growth of AI.

Now, those data centres depend not only on vast amounts of reliable electricity, but also on large volumes of water, both to keep their servers cool and indirectly through electricity generation to power them.

Yet global water demand, how much we need, is currently expected to exceed supply, how much we have, by up to 40% by 2030.

So I wanted to ask a question that sounds almost dystopian.

Could we reach a point where water is prioritized for cooling servers over supplying people's drinking water?

I put that to Ollie Hayes from Global Action Plan UK, who's campaigning to force AI companies to disclose exactly how much water their operations really consume.

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