Programmes

The rapid expansion of artificial intelligence is driving a parallel expansion of the infrastructure on which it depends. Data centres consumed around 415 terawatt-hours (TWh) of electricity in 2024, roughly 1.5% of global demand, and the International Energy Agency's base case projects about 945 TWh by 2030. Governments in the Gulf and Europe have responded by treating data centres as strategic assets while remaining committed to decarbonising their energy systems. Yet a commitment to clean energy does not necessarily amount to clean data centres.   This distinction is becoming increasingly important because the timelines differ so sharply. A data centre can be built in one to two years, whereas transmission takes far longer and new clean generation, nuclear in particular, longer still. When demand arrives before supply, the gap tends to be filled by gas. Ireland illustrates the dilemma: data centres accounted for 23% of its metered electricity in 2025, up from 5% in 2015, and the regulator now requires new large facilities to bring their own generation or storage. The central question, therefore, is whether AI infrastructure and the green transition can advance together.

On October 2, the death of a 28-year-old laboratory technician at the Irkutsk Anti-Plague Institute set off emergency measures in Russia. Nearly 200 people have been placed under medical observation, the district hospital in Shelekhov has been quarantined, and Russia's chief sanitary official, Anna Popova, has travelled from Moscow to oversee the response. Moscow's public health watchdog, Rospotrebnadzor, describes the case only as "pneumonia of unknown etiology" and calls the situation in Irkutsk and Shelekhov "stable," while the head of neighbouring Buryatia has said the woman died of plague. This raises a critical question: is this an isolated, contained infection, or the first sign of a pneumonic plague outbreak that Moscow is struggling to manage, and to disclose? Pneumonic plague is the most dangerous form of the disease. It spreads person to person through respiratory droplets, can kill within days if untreated, and is treatable with early antibiotics. That makes the first days of any case decisive and makes official transparency as important as the clinical response.  

The international system faces complex geostrategic pressures that place global supply chains under unprecedented strain. Escalating military tensions, particularly disruptions to shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, are putting pressure on oil and liquefied natural gas flows. In 2025, this passage carried around a quarter of seaborne oil trade and 19% of global trade in liquefied natural gas. These developments coincide with a shift in the Russia–Ukraine conflict towards attacks on energy infrastructure, alongside tighter restrictions on Black Sea shipping and disruptions to key export routes for strategically important grains. This convergence leaves the world caught between declining oil supplies and restricted access to part of the available food supply, complicating procurement and threatening the foundations of national security.   Faced with these shortages and rising shipping costs, some major powers and emerging economies are expanding biofuel production as an instrument of national policy to ease the energy crisis, alongside pursuing environmental objectives and supporting agricultural production. Agricultural producer countries are consequently choosing to redirect part of their strategic crop output, including maize, sugar cane and palm oil, towards biofuel plants to meet transport needs. This analysis advances the hypothesis that expanding biofuels derived from food crops may heighten the vulnerability of importing countries when demand growth outstrips the capacity of production and stocks to accommodate it, while trade policies restrict exportable supplies. The scale of this effect depends on the feedstocks used, the volume diverted and the responsiveness of production. It does not apply to the same extent to fuels produced from agricultural residues or used oils.   Import-dependent countries, particularly in the Middle East and Africa, may bear the cost of these pressures through diminished food security and domestic stability. An inability to secure food can, in this context, undermine social stability and signal the risk of political crises whose severity varies according to institutional effectiveness and the capacity to protect the most vulnerable groups. This complex situation poses an urgent question: how far can importing countries withstand the convergence of energy and food policies, and what protective mechanisms can safeguard their national security as competition intensifies between the use of crops for food and for fuel?

On 23 September 2026, the United Nations Security Council confronted an unusual development in international security. The people warning governments about the dangers of AI were not only diplomats or military officials, but the executives building the technology itself. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, and Hugging Face co-founder Clément Delangue briefed the 15-member Council as governments grapple with increasingly capable AI systems that can write code, operate autonomously, interact with external systems, and potentially improve their own capabilities. Amodei warned that, if poorly managed, “AI could be a risk to humanity as a whole”, while Altman argued that decisions about AI could not be left to technology companies alone.   The meeting was significant because AI is rapidly moving from a technology-policy issue into the domain of international security. Yet the deeper question is not simply how dangerous AI may become. It is who will establish the rules governing a technology increasingly concentrated in the hands of a small number of states and companies. The UN is attempting to become the forum where those rules are debated, but it is entering a contest in which technological capabilities, economic power, national security interests, and competing visions of governance are already shaping the outcome.