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A new litigation frontier
The LSE Grantham Research Institute’s latest annual review of global climate litigation identifies data centre water consumption and energy sourcing as one of the next major frontiers for climate-related legal action around the world. In 2025 alone, 249 new climate cases were filed globally, bringing the total since 1986 to more than 3,600, with cases now spanning 62 countries. Among the emerging themes identified by the report is the growing body of litigation targeting the environmental footprint of data centres, encompassing water use, air quality, and reliance on fossil fuels, all of which carry direct implications for water sector planning and resource allocation.
Water consumption at the core
Data centres require significant quantities of water for server cooling, placing them in direct competition with public water supply in water-stressed regions. The LSE report cites a 2020 legal case in Santiago, Chile, where residents and local authorities successfully challenged Google’s data centre development on the grounds that climate impacts on an already stressed water supply had not been adequately assessed, as one of the earliest examples of this type of litigation. The precedent it established has since contributed to a broader global pattern of communities and environmental groups challenging data centre approvals on water and environmental impact grounds.
The UK dimension
In the UK, a legal challenge was brought against the government’s approval of a hyperscale data centre in Buckinghamshire, arguing that the project’s electricity and water demands had not been properly assessed in the planning process. The government subsequently acknowledged procedural flaws, the legal action was withdrawn, and the developer has since accepted that environmental mitigation measures must be made contractually binding with the local authority. The LSE report notes that such cases, even where they do not result in formal judgments against developers, can meaningfully improve transparency and drive changes in climate-related decision-making.
As the UK’s data centre sector continues to expand, driven in part by AI infrastructure investment, the water demands of these facilities are becoming a material consideration for water resource planners and abstractors. Large-scale cooling operations can represent significant localised demand, and where they rely on abstraction from rivers or groundwater systems already under stress, they may conflict with environmental flow requirements and Water Framework Directive objectives. The LSE report identifies data centre emissions litigation as one of three areas in which the next wave of climate litigation cases is likely to emerge.
Planning applications for new hyperscale and AI-focused data centre developments will increasingly attract scrutiny over water impact assessments. UK water sector professionals involved in abstraction licensing, catchment management, or environmental permitting should monitor how planning policy and environmental law evolve in response to this litigation trend.