New carbon emissions associated with the AI and Digital sector are complex, but even with renewable energy powered data centres the accelerated construction of new AI data centres in the UK will undermine attempts to reduce carbon emissions, and make it difficult if not impossible to meet the reductions necessary to abide by the Climate Change Act and Environment Act.

I presented the “AI Futures Beyond Net Zero” paper online at the Relating Systems Thinking and Design (RSD15) conference today, Thursday 8 October 2026. The paper describes insights from the Future Observatory/AHRC funded Transition Templates AI and Digital research project (2025). The #RSD15 community makes all presentations freely available, so it should be on their website soon. The TTA&D project (2025) uses the Transition Template method, developed and builds on previous work in the sector published #RSD13.