Turkey has launched the voluntary Antalya AI Pledge ahead of COP31, placing AI among the ways countries could tackle global warming while acknowledging the emissions associated with data centres, Bloomberg reported on 28 October. The pledge is due to be unveiled at the United Nations climate summit in Antalya. COP31, the 31st United Nations Climate Change Conference, is scheduled for 9 to 20 November, Punch reported.
Key points
- Countries, non-governmental organisations and financial institutions would identify commitments voluntarily, including possible disclosure requirements for AI providers.
- Participating countries remain unknown. EU Climate Commissioner Wopke Hoekstra said the bloc was considering whether to join.
- The US, the biggest developer of data centres, is no longer part of the COP process.
- Countries would return to the following summit in Addis Ababa to review progress.
The Antalya AI Pledge leaves commitments to participants
Under the pledge as reported, countries, non-governmental organisations and financial institutions would choose voluntary commitments. One example is requiring AI providers to disclose data about their energy use and environmental impact. Another is requiring data centres to use clean power. The pledge also puts forward possible targets. Those examples describe measures participants could adopt, rather than requirements already imposed on every provider or data-centre operator.
Participation remains unsettled. Bloomberg reported that it was not clear which countries would sign. Wopke Hoekstra, the European Union’s climate commissioner, said the bloc was examining the pledge before deciding whether to join. His account places the EU among prospective participants, not signatories. The US is no longer part of the COP process, although it is the biggest developer of data centres.
Evan Tachovsky, chief data and AI officer at the climate non-profit World Resources Institute, welcomed the pledge’s treatment of AI’s potential climate uses and its environmental costs. He also argued that it lacked accountability mechanisms capable of directing governments and technology companies towards better practice. That objection concerns how commitments would be followed through: the reported proposals ask participants to identify measures, then envisage a later review of progress.
BloombergNEF expects data-centre energy use to rise
The pledge arrives amid a growing energy demand from data centres. By 2030, data centres are expected to account for more than twice their present share of worldwide energy consumption, according to BloombergNEF. In the US, technology companies are racing to bring data centres online by developing new gas-fired power stations, Bloomberg reported. Those facilities are becoming a substantial source of greenhouse gas emissions — a cost that sits alongside the pledge’s proposed use of AI to address warming.
The wider climate timetable is already under pressure. The Paris Agreement commits countries to limiting warming to 1.5 Celsius above pre-industrial levels, while the United Nations has warned that the world is on course to exceed that goal. Simon Stiell, executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, said in September that AI was “energy guzzling” and increasing pollution from fossil fuels. He warned AI leaders that they were “on thin ice”.
Turkey’s pledge brings those two uses of the technology into the same climate discussion. Its proposed disclosures concern the resources consumed by providers, while its clean-power example concerns the electricity used to run data centres. The pledge presents disclosure and clean-power requirements as examples of voluntary commitments. The commitments would instead be selected by countries and other participants under the voluntary arrangement.
COP31 prepares for a later Addis Ababa review
Turkey is also presenting COP31 as a meeting concerned with carrying out climate commitments. At a climate-finance meeting in Abuja on 27 October, Mehmet Poroy, Turkey’s ambassador to Nigeria, called for work on commitments already made to advance rather than remain in negotiation, Punch reported. He described access to finance and help preparing projects as important to developing countries’ ability to act on their climate plans. Those remarks concerned the summit’s broader agenda, rather than a commitment under the AI pledge.
For the Antalya AI Pledge, the reported next step after participants identify their voluntary measures is a return to the following climate summit. Countries would meet at the 2027 summit in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, to take stock of progress.
