This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

As dozens of heads of state arrived in Azerbaijan for the annual United Nations climate talks this week, one absent world leader’s name was on everyone’s lips. At press conference after press conference, questions arose about the election of Donald Trump. The president-elect has threatened to pull the United States out of the landmark Paris climate agreement—for a second time—and slow down the country’s transition to renewable energy.

The Biden administration has tried to project confidence in the early days of the conference, which is known as COP29, given the country’s status as the world’s largest economy and second-largest emitter of planet-warming carbon. At a packed-house presser on the conference’s first day, President Joe Biden’s senior climate advisor, John Podesta, said he expected many of Biden’s clean energy achievements—which are projected to put the US within close reach of its international climate commitments—will endure a second Trump administration.

He added that the US will still release a document detailing its updated plan to do its part to limit global warming below the 2 degrees Celsius threshold outlined in the 2015 Paris Agreement, as required under that treaty. “The work to contain climate change is going to continue in the United States with commitment and passion and belief,” he said.

But other signs at the conference suggest that the US has already receded from a starring role in the fight against climate change. Developing countries have long criticized the US as an obstacle to major climate agreements, in particular on the issue of overseas aid to help poor countries fund their energy transitions and protect themselves from climate-fueled natural disasters.

Establishing a new global goal for this sort of international aid is the main agenda item for this year’s conference, but the center of gravity in negotiations has clearly shifted away from the U.S. and toward Europe, China, and the dozens of developing countries pushing for a big increase in international assistance.

Even Canada, which just announced a $1.5 billion program to help the world’s most vulnerable countries pursue climate adaptation projects, is beginning to outshine the US on this issue. Likewise, the headline item from the first day of the conference—an arcane spat over the implications of the agenda structure, which pitted a bloc of developing countries against the European Union over the latter’s carbon tariff system—did not feature the US in a starring role.

In a gaggle with reporters on the second day of the conference, White House climate czar Ali Zaidi seemed to acknowledge a diminished US role in climate talks. He vowed that the Biden administration would continue working toward an ambitious international finance goal, but he admitted that climate-conscious Americans may want to “look for other countries to step up to the plate” during the Trump administration. “We may have less to offer in terms of a projection of leadership certainty,” he said.

Perhaps the clearest indication of the diminished US role in the global climate puzzle is the maze of national pavilions that sprawls across the conference venue at the Baku Olympic Stadium. The US national pavilion is one of the most humble in the entire complex: a plain white room with white chairs, white desks, a television screen, and no other decorations save a single potted plant and a few foam-board posters.

The Kazakhstan pavilion next door, by contrast, has a massive light-up display with the country’s name and a stage on risers surrounded by handsome blond wood. The United Kingdom pavilion has a free, full-service cappuccino bar and a full-size model depicting London’s signature red telephone booths. The Brazil pavilion is embowered in tropical foliage and features a display of baskets by traditional artisans. In the home-country pavilion of Azerbaijan, waitstaff serve fresh tea on demand.

“You’re not the first person to say this,” said a member of the US delegation when Grist mentioned the apparent lack of effort put into his country’s pavilion. The member said he was “shocked” when he first saw the space, and he added that a more ambitious effort would have helped “show that we care.”

This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

The morning temperature is nearing 100 degrees Fahrenheit as Keith Seaman sweats beneath his bucket hat, walking door to door through the cookie-cutter blocks of a subdivision in Casa Grande, Arizona. Seaman, a Democrat who represents this Republican-leaning area in the state’s House of Representatives, is trying to retain a seat he won by a margin of around 600 votes just two years ago. He wants to know what issues matter most to his constituents, but most of them don’t answer the door, or they say they’re too busy to talk. Those that do answer tend to mention standard campaign issues like rising prices and education—which Seaman, a former public school teacher, is only too happy to discuss.

“We’ll do our best to get more public money into education,” he tells one man in the neighborhood, before turning to the constituent’s kindergarten-age daughter to pat her on the head. “What grade are you in?”

“Why are you at our house?” the girl asks in return.

Seaman has knocked on thousands of doors as he seeks reelection this year. While his voters are fired up about everything from inflation to abortion, one issue doesn’t come up much on Seaman’s scorching tour through suburbia—even though it’s plainly visible in the parched cotton and alfalfa fields that surround the subdivision where he’s stumping for votes.

That issue is water. In Pinal County, which Seaman represents, water shortages mean that farmers no longer have access to the Colorado River, formerly the lifeblood of their cotton and alfalfa empires. The booming population of the area’s subdivisions face a water reckoning as well: The state has placed a moratorium on new housing development in parts of the county, as part of an effort to protect dwindling groundwater resources.  

Over the past four years, Arizona has become a poster child for water scarcity in the United States. Between decades of unsustainable groundwater pumping and a once-in-a-millenium drought, fueled by climate change, water sources in every region of the state are under threat. As groundwater aquifers dry up near some of the most populous areas, officials have blocked thousands of new homes from being built in and around the booming Phoenix metropolitan area.

“They keep saying, ‘Well, water is nonpartisan.’ That’s not true anymore. It’s really not true.”

In more remote parts of the state, water-guzzling dairy farms have caused local residents’ wells to run dry. The drought on the Colorado River, long a lifeline for both agriculture and suburbia across the US West, has forced further water cuts to both farms and neighborhoods in the heart of the state. 

Arizona voters know that they’re deciding the country’s future—the state is one of just a half-dozen likely to determine the next president—but it’s unclear if they know that they’re voting on an existential threat in their own backyards. The outcome of state legislative races in swing districts like Seaman’s will determine who controls the divided state legislature, where Democrats are promoting new water restrictions and Republicans are fighting to protect thirsty industries like real estate and agriculture, regardless of what that means for future water availability. 

“Everybody’s running for reelection,” said Kathleen Ferris, who crafted some of the state’s landmark water legislation and now teaches water policy at Arizona State University. “Nobody wants to sit around the table and try to deal with these issues.”

For these lawmakers’ voters, topics like abortion, the economy, and public safety are drawing far more attention than the water in their taps, and it will be these issues that drive the most people to the polls. But for the state officials who win on election day, their most consequential legacy may well be what they decide to do about the future of water in Arizona.

“They keep saying, ‘Well, water is nonpartisan,’” Ferris added. “That’s not true anymore. It’s really not true.”

It’s not hard to see why hot-button issues like immigration and the cost of living are on the minds of Arizona voters: The state sits on the US-Mexico border and has experienced some of the highest rates of inflation in the country over the past few years. Meanwhile, its Republican-controlled state legislature has cut public education funding and allowed a 19th-century abortion ban to remain in effect after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. The state is at the center of almost every major political debate—“the center of the political universe,” in Politico’s words—and its nearly evenly divided electorate makes its swing votes key to determining who controls both the White House and Congress.

Even when the temperature doesn’t top 115 degrees F, the resulting campaign frenzy can make an out-of-state visitor lightheaded. Lawn signs clutter gas station parking lots, highway medians, and front yards; virtually every other television commercial is an ad for or against a candidate for Congress, the presidency, or some state office. A commercial slamming a Democratic candidate as a defund-the-police radical will frequently air right after an ad condemning a Republican as a threat to democracy itself. Mailers and campaign literature clog mailboxes and dangle on doorknobs. 

This avalanche of campaign advertising seldom mentions water. During a week reporting in the state, I saw exactly one ad that focused on the issue. It was a billboard in Tucson announcing that Kirsten Engel, the Democratic candidate for a pivotal congressional seat, supports “Protecting Arizona from Drought”—not exactly the most substantive engagement with the issue.

The reason for this avoidance is simple, according to Nick Ponder, a vice president of government affairs at HighGround, a leading Arizona political strategy firm. He said that while many voters in the state rank water among their top three or four issues, most don’t have a detailed understanding of water policy—meaning it’s unlikely that they’ll vote based on how candidates say they’ll handle water issues.

“They understand that we’re in a desert, and that we have water challenges—in particular groundwater and the Colorado River—but I don’t think that they understand how to best manage that,” he told Grist.

“We’re supposed to be able to get a part of that water, and now we can’t. It’s all going to California, to the f—ing liberals and the Democrats.” 

And how could they? Understanding Arizona water policy involves a maze of acronyms—AMA, GMA, INA, ADWR, CAWS, DAWS, DCP, CAP, and CAGRD are just the entry-level nouns—and complex technical models that track water levels thousands of feet underground. Even many elected officials on both sides of the aisle aren’t well versed in the issue, so they defer to the party leaders who have the strongest grasp on how the state’s water system works.

One upshot of this confusion — as well as the state’s bitter partisan divide — is that, even as Arizona’s water crisis has gained national attention, state lawmakers have failed to pass significant legislation to address the deficit of this critical resource. Over the past two years, the state’s Democratic governor, Katie Hobbs, has been unable to broker a deal with the Republicans who control both chambers of the state legislature. Hobbs has put forward a series of proposals that would reform both agricultural water use in rural areas and rapid development in the suburbs of Phoenix, but she has come up a handful of votes short of passing them. Republicans have put forward their own plans—which are friendlier to the avowed water needs of farmers and housing developers—that she has vetoed.

Once you cut through the thicket of reports and acronyms, it’s clear that this year’s election is pivotal for breaking this gridlock and determining the future of water policy in the state. Republicans hold one-vote majorities in both chambers of the legislature, so state Democrats only need to flip one seat in each chamber in order to gain unified control of the government. If that happens, Hobbs will be able to ignore the objections of the agriculture and homebuilding industries, which have kept Republicans from signing on to her plans.

Hobbs and the Democrats want to limit or prohibit new farmland in rural areas, while simultaneously making it harder for homebuilders around Phoenix and Casa Grande to resume building new subdivisions. This would slow down, but not reverse, the decline in water levels around the state — and it would likely diminish profits for two industries that are pillars of the state’s economy. If Republicans retain control of the legislature, they would reopen new suburban development and roll out more flexible rules for rural groundwater, giving a freer hand to both industries but incurring the risk of more groundwater shortages in decades to come.

Legislators came close to reaching agreement on both issues earlier this year. Republicans passed a bill that would relax development restrictions on fallow farmland where housing tracts could be developed—a compromise with theoretical appeal to both parties’ desire to keep building housing for the state’s booming population—but Hobbs vetoed it, saying it lacked enough safeguards to prevent future water shortages. At the same time, lawmakers from both parties made progress on a deal that would allow the state to set limits on groundwater drainage in rural areas, but the talks stalled as this year’s legislative session came to a close.

“We had so many meetings, and we’ve never gotten closer,” said Priya Sundareshan, a Democratic state senator who is the party’s foremost expert on water issues in the legislature. “Now we’re in campaign mode.”

In Seaman’s district of Pinal County, where water restrictions have created difficulties for both the agriculture and real estate industries, many of those who are engaged on water issues see a stark partisan divide. Paul Keeling, a fifth-generation farmer in Casa Grande, framed the shortage of water on the Colorado River as a competition between red Arizona and blue California.

“We’re supposed to be able to get a part of that water, and now we can’t,” he told Grist. “It’s all going to California, to the f***ing liberals and the Democrats.” 

Keeling has had to shrink his family’s cotton-farming enterprise over the past few years, because he’s lost the right to draw water from the canal that delivers Colorado River water to Arizona. It’s one reason among many that Keeling said he’s supporting former President Donald Trump this year, as he has in the past two elections.

The Republican leadership of Pinal County has sparred with Governor Hobbs and state Democrats on housing issues as well, albeit in far less animated terms. In response to studies showing the county’s aquifer diminishing, the state government placed a moratorium on new groundwater-fed development in the area in 2019. Homebuilders and developers pinned their hopes on Republicans’ proposed reform allowing new development on former farmland, but Hobbs’ veto dashed those dreams.

Stephen Miller, a conservative Republican who serves on the county’s board of supervisors, told Grist that he views the Democrats’ opposition to new Pinal County development as motivated by partisan politics. The Republicans legislators who represent the area voted in favor of the bill that would restart development, but Seaman, the area’s lone Democratic representative, voted against it.

“We’re just sitting back watching because the makeup of the House and the Senate will determine what happens here,” Miller said. “If they’re both taken over by the Democrats, I think there’s probably very little we can do [to relax the development restrictions].”

As Miller sees it, the restriction on new housing is part of a ploy by the state’s Democratic establishment to suppress growth in a conservative area—or even repossess its water.

“It shouldn’t be a partisan thing at all,” he said. “You’d think that they’d all want to pull this wagon in the same direction. But all they want Pinal County for is to stick a straw in here and take our water.”

Another reason for the relative campaign silence on water issues is that the regions where water is most threatened—areas where massive agricultural groundwater usage has emptied household wells and caused land to crack apart—tend to be represented by the politicians who are most dismissive of water conservation efforts, and vice versa.

Cochise County, where an enormous dairy operation called Riverview has residents up in arms over vanishing well water, backed Trump by almost 20 points in 2020; La Paz County, where a massive Saudi farming operation has drained local aquifers, backed the former president by almost 40 points. The state representatives from these areas are almost all Republicans opposed to new water regulation; many have direct ties to the agriculture or real estate industries.

Meanwhile, the majority of pro-regulation Democrats in the state legislature represent urban areas that have more diverse sources of water, stronger regulations, and more backup water to help them get through periods of shortage. 

The state legislature’s two leading voices on water exemplify this divide. Democratic state senator Priya Sundareshan represents a progressive district in the core of Tucson, where city leaders have banked trillions of gallons of Colorado River water, all but ensuring that the city won’t go dry—and can even continue to grow as the river shrinks.

Sundareshan’s chief adversary is Republican Gail Griffin, a veteran legislator from Cochise County who chairs the lower chamber’s powerful natural resources committee. Griffin, a realtor, has blocked nearly all proposed water legislation for years, preventing even bills from members of her own party from getting a vote. Other legislators and water experts often cite her as the principal reason the state has not moved any major bills to regulate rural water usage—even though the county she represents faces arguably the most acute water crisis of them all. (Griffin did not respond to Grist’s requests for comment.)

Sundareshan, for her part, admits that it’s awkward that urban legislators are trying to set water policy for the rural parts of the state. But she says that Republicans have stalled on the issue for too long.

“It doesn’t look great,” she said. “But right now, rural legislators are setting policy for urban areas. That’s why that’s why legislators like me are stepping up to say, ‘Well, we need to actually solve these issues.’ Water is water, right? And the lack of availability of water in a rural area is going to impact the availability of water in our urban areas.”

The backlash to unsustainable groundwater pumping is not just coming from urban progressives, though—it’s also coming rural Republicans’ own constituents. In 2022, Cochise County voters approved a ballot proposal to restrict the growth of their water usage. (The strictness of the new rules is still being debated.) Even so, there’s no sign that any of these areas will endorse a Democrat. When Hobbs held a series of town halls in rural areas facing groundwater issues last year, she and her staff faced significant blowback from attendees who didn’t want the state meddling in their water usage. This year, elections in these areas are not even close to competitive. Griffin, the legislature’s strongest opponent of water regulation, is running unopposed.

This means that the future of the state’s water policy depends on voters in just a few swing districts that straddle the urban-rural divide: suburban seats on the outskirts of Phoenix and Tucson, where new subdivisions collide with vestigial farmland and open desert. For many voters in these purple districts, Arizona’s water problems are far from a motivating political issue—and likely won’t be for decades to come, as aquifers silently diminish underground. Voters might hear about water issues in other parts of the state, or wince when they see their water bills, but the disappearing water under their feet is all but invisible, and may remain so for the rest of their lives.

This dissonance is best exemplified by the 17th state legislative district, perhaps the most pivotal swing seat in the legislature. The district extends along the northern edge of Tucson, roping in a mix of retirement communities, rural houses, and cotton farms that may soon be replaced by new tract housing. Many of the new developments in these areas, such as the sprawling Saddlebrooke neighborhood, rely on finite aquifers and get water delivered by private companies. To comply with Arizona law, developers have to prove that they have enough water to supply new homes for 100 years, but even that doesn’t guarantee that the aquifers won’t continue drying up. 

It’s difficult to interest voters in a groundwater decline that is happening out of view, in a crisis that almost nobody is talking about publicly. The best that local Democrats can do is make a general pitch that water security is a common sense, bipartisan problem that they are committed to solving—without needing to explain how they would resolve complex questions about the interplay between water regulation and economic growth, among other nuances. 

John McLean, a former engineer who is running against a conservative legislator in an effort to flip the 17th district, has sought to position himself as a straight-down-the-middle moderate. His campaign literature tends not to mention his party affiliation, but it does tout water as one of his three key policy issues, along with public education and abortion access. The campaign pamphlet he’s been leaving in the doorways of homes in Saddlebrooke argues for a “commonsense approaches to secure our water future” and declares that “we must stop foreign and out-of-state corporations from pumping unlimited water out of our state”—something that has happened in the conservative, rural parts of Arizona, but nowhere near Saddlebrooke and the 17th district.

When I joined him as he knocked doors in Saddlebrooke, McLean told me that he’s found that almost every voter he meets agrees with him on the need for sensible water regulations—a far cry from lightning-rod issues like public safety, abortion, and inflation. 

“Everybody is really serious about water independence, and I think that they’re concerned about partisanship,” he said. “I don’t think there’s really much of a partisan difference among citizens when it comes to water.”

That apparent consensus, however, does not extend to the state’s elected officials.

“My Republican opponent voted to relax groundwater pumping restrictions,” McLean, referring to a bill that would have eliminated legal liability for groundwater users whose water usage compromised nearby rivers or streams. “So he was on exactly the wrong side of that one.”

This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

There are battleground states, and then there’s North Carolina. Former President Donald Trump won the state by 1.3 percent in 2020, his lowest margin of victory in any state, and polls now show Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris within just 2 percentage points of each other there. It also has more electoral votes than several of the other swing states that will decide the November election, including Michigan, Wisconsin, and Arizona.

“Kamala Harris wins North Carolina, she is the next president of the United States,” Roy Cooper, the Democratic governor of North Carolina, said at an event in New York City last week. 

Then Hurricane Helene etched a 500-mile path of destruction through the southeastern United States, killing at least 139 people in six states and causing more than $100 billion in damages, according to preliminary estimates. 

“There’s no saying, yet, how many of the people who will staff these polling places have been displaced, hurt, or killed by the storm.”

In western North Carolina, moisture-laden Helene collided with a cold front that was already dropping rain on the Appalachian Mountains. Hundreds of roads in the region are now impassable or have been wiped off the map by flooding and landslides, communication systems are down, and hundreds of people are still missing. As the North Carolina Department of Transportation put it, “All roads in Western North Carolina should be considered closed.” With just weeks until November 5, thousands of people displaced, mail service shut down or restricted in many zip codes, and many roadways shuttered, officials are now rushing to figure out how to handle voting in the midst of disaster.

“This storm is like nothing we’ve seen in our lifetimes in western North Carolina,” Karen Brinson Bell, one of North Carolina’s top election officials, told reporters on Tuesday. “The destruction is unprecedented and this level of uncertainty this close to Election Day is daunting.” 

Delivery of absentee ballots in North Carolina had already been delayed by three weeks by former presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s last-minute lawsuit to take his name off of millions of already-printed ballots. The state’s election process is already in full swing: The deadline for voter registration in North Carolina is October 11, the early voting period in the state begins on October 17, and early voting ends on November 2. “We will take the measures necessary to ensure there is voting,” Brinson Bell said.

But there are innumerable issues to solve first, and state officials still don’t have a full assessment of the damage Helene caused. “There’s a cascading series of problems,” said Gerry Cohen, a member of the elections board for Wake County, the state’s most populous county, which includes Raleigh. 

At the moment, the central logistical problem is that the US Postal Service has suspended service across much of western North Carolina. Even before the storm, more than 190,000 North Carolinians had requested mail-in ballots this election. The agency does not yet have an estimate of when mail will be restored—damage is so severe in some zip codes that it may be weeks or even months before local roads are passable. The issue is compounded by the fact that in rural areas, some postal workers use their own vehicles to deliver mail. Neither the state nor the Postal Service knows how many of those cars were destroyed by the storm. 

“The smaller counties just had one early voting location, and it’s normally at the Board of Elections office, which is usually downtown…near rivers and creeks.”

“At this time, we are still assessing damage and impacts,” a spokesperson for the Postal Service told Grist. “As we continue our work on this, we will continue to communicate with local boards of election in impacted areas to ensure the ongoing transport and delivery of election mail as soon as it is safe to do so.”

Under state law, it is up to each voter to request a new ballot to the temporary address where they are staying. Voters must mail these ballots back in time for them to reach election offices by 7:30 p.m. on Election Day. The state used to have a three-day grace period for late-arriving ballots, but it ended that policy last year. The Elections Board is currently assessing whether it will ask the state to reinstate it. There’s also no way of tracking where the absentee ballots that counties already sent out ended up, or whether the delivery of those ballots was affected by the storm. “Who knows where they are,” Cohen said.

And then there’s the matter of in-person voting, which faces further logistical hurdles. Brinson Bell said that while there have been no reports of voting equipment or ballots destroyed by Helene, 12 county election offices in western North Carolina are currently closed due to flooding and other storm-related impacts. “There may be polling places affected by mudslides, there may be polling places inaccessible because of damaged roads, there may be polling places with trees that have fallen on them,” Brinson Bell said. There’s no saying, yet, how many of the people who will staff these polling places have been displaced, hurt, or killed by the storm.

Every county in North Carolina must offer at least 13 days of in-person early voting, and right now the state requires counties to open this process on October 17. Cohen said that many counties will struggle to meet that deadline, in particular smaller ones.

“The smaller counties just had one early voting location, and it’s normally at the Board of Elections office, which is usually downtown,” he said. “Because of the way these mountain towns were laid out in the 1700s or 1800s, they’re near rivers and creeks, so they’re prone to flooding.”

Cohen said he’s heard that the North Carolina legislature, which will convene next week, is considering some flexibility for early voting in affected counties, as well as resources to help these counties establish new voting sites and train up replacement poll workers. He believes the state can still manage a robust election if it provides proper support for local election boards—in other words, he said, “appropriate money.”

Political scientists have warned about the inevitability of an event like Helene subverting a national election.

But the challenge that eclipses all other voting accessibility issues is the simple fact that people who have been affected by a historic and deadly flood event typically aren’t thinking about where they will cast their ballots—they’re focusing on locating their loved ones, mucking out their houses, finding new housing, filing insurance claims, and dozens of other priorities that trump voting. 

The State Board of Elections in North Carolina has a website where residents can check their voter registration status, register a new permanent or temporary address, and monitor the progress of their mail-in ballot. But even if people wanted to find out where or how to vote, hundreds of thousands of customers in the state are currently without power, WiFi, and cell service. 

For years, political scientists who study the effects of climate change on political turnout have warned about the inevitability of an event like Helene subverting a national election. “Hurricane season in the U.S.—between June and November every year—usually coincides with election season,” a recent report by the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, or IDEA, said. “The chances of hurricanes disrupting US elections are ever-present and will increase as hurricanes become more common and intense due to climate change.” 

Prior to Helene, four elections were significantly disrupted by hurricanes in the 21st century: Hurricane Katrina in 2005, Hurricane Sandy in 2012, Hurricane Michael in 2018, and Hurricane Ian in 2022. The report by IDEA found that voter turnout can dip precipitously during these events.

“The biggest challenge that we see is not just technology failure, but a decrease in public confidence,” Vasu Mohan, a senior advisor at IDEA who has analyzed how disasters affect elections in dozens of countries, told Grist. “If you’re not prepared, then making last minute accommodations is extremely difficult.” However, Mohan’s research shows that it’s possible to conduct elections fairly after displacement events if communities are given the resources they need. 

“I am very, very worried about how [the storm] will affect voting,” said Abby Werner, a pediatrician who lives in Charlotte, a city in central North Carolina that did not sustain severe damage from the storm. Werner is a Democrat, and makes a point of voting in person. She fears the storm will suppress voter turnout. “In a series of worries, it is an additional wave,” she said. 

Brinson Bell’s office will likely face a flurry of lawsuits due to its handling of post-storm voting—it is already navigating a lawsuit, filed by Republican groups prior to the storm, over its handling of hundreds of thousands of voter registrations. But Brinson Bell said the COVID-19 pandemic and prior storms prepared the state for worst-case scenarios. “We held an incredibly successful election with record turnout during the Covid pandemic,” she said. “We’ve battled through hurricanes and tropical storms and still held safe and secure elections. And we will do everything in our power to do so again.”

This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

There are battleground states, and then there’s North Carolina. Former President Donald Trump won the state by 1.3 percent in 2020, his lowest margin of victory in any state, and polls now show Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris within just 2 percentage points of each other there. It also has more electoral votes than several of the other swing states that will decide the November election, including Michigan, Wisconsin, and Arizona.

“Kamala Harris wins North Carolina, she is the next president of the United States,” Roy Cooper, the Democratic governor of North Carolina, said at an event in New York City last week. 

Then Hurricane Helene etched a 500-mile path of destruction through the southeastern United States, killing at least 139 people in six states and causing more than $100 billion in damages, according to preliminary estimates. 

“There’s no saying, yet, how many of the people who will staff these polling places have been displaced, hurt, or killed by the storm.”

In western North Carolina, moisture-laden Helene collided with a cold front that was already dropping rain on the Appalachian Mountains. Hundreds of roads in the region are now impassable or have been wiped off the map by flooding and landslides, communication systems are down, and hundreds of people are still missing. As the North Carolina Department of Transportation put it, “All roads in Western North Carolina should be considered closed.” With just weeks until November 5, thousands of people displaced, mail service shut down or restricted in many zip codes, and many roadways shuttered, officials are now rushing to figure out how to handle voting in the midst of disaster.

“This storm is like nothing we’ve seen in our lifetimes in western North Carolina,” Karen Brinson Bell, one of North Carolina’s top election officials, told reporters on Tuesday. “The destruction is unprecedented and this level of uncertainty this close to Election Day is daunting.” 

Delivery of absentee ballots in North Carolina had already been delayed by three weeks by former presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s last-minute lawsuit to take his name off of millions of already-printed ballots. The state’s election process is already in full swing: The deadline for voter registration in North Carolina is October 11, the early voting period in the state begins on October 17, and early voting ends on November 2. “We will take the measures necessary to ensure there is voting,” Brinson Bell said.

But there are innumerable issues to solve first, and state officials still don’t have a full assessment of the damage Helene caused. “There’s a cascading series of problems,” said Gerry Cohen, a member of the elections board for Wake County, the state’s most populous county, which includes Raleigh. 

At the moment, the central logistical problem is that the US Postal Service has suspended service across much of western North Carolina. Even before the storm, more than 190,000 North Carolinians had requested mail-in ballots this election. The agency does not yet have an estimate of when mail will be restored—damage is so severe in some zip codes that it may be weeks or even months before local roads are passable. The issue is compounded by the fact that in rural areas, some postal workers use their own vehicles to deliver mail. Neither the state nor the Postal Service knows how many of those cars were destroyed by the storm. 

“The smaller counties just had one early voting location, and it’s normally at the Board of Elections office, which is usually downtown…near rivers and creeks.”

“At this time, we are still assessing damage and impacts,” a spokesperson for the Postal Service told Grist. “As we continue our work on this, we will continue to communicate with local boards of election in impacted areas to ensure the ongoing transport and delivery of election mail as soon as it is safe to do so.”

Under state law, it is up to each voter to request a new ballot to the temporary address where they are staying. Voters must mail these ballots back in time for them to reach election offices by 7:30 p.m. on Election Day. The state used to have a three-day grace period for late-arriving ballots, but it ended that policy last year. The Elections Board is currently assessing whether it will ask the state to reinstate it. There’s also no way of tracking where the absentee ballots that counties already sent out ended up, or whether the delivery of those ballots was affected by the storm. “Who knows where they are,” Cohen said.

And then there’s the matter of in-person voting, which faces further logistical hurdles. Brinson Bell said that while there have been no reports of voting equipment or ballots destroyed by Helene, 12 county election offices in western North Carolina are currently closed due to flooding and other storm-related impacts. “There may be polling places affected by mudslides, there may be polling places inaccessible because of damaged roads, there may be polling places with trees that have fallen on them,” Brinson Bell said. There’s no saying, yet, how many of the people who will staff these polling places have been displaced, hurt, or killed by the storm.

Every county in North Carolina must offer at least 13 days of in-person early voting, and right now the state requires counties to open this process on October 17. Cohen said that many counties will struggle to meet that deadline, in particular smaller ones.

“The smaller counties just had one early voting location, and it’s normally at the Board of Elections office, which is usually downtown,” he said. “Because of the way these mountain towns were laid out in the 1700s or 1800s, they’re near rivers and creeks, so they’re prone to flooding.”

Cohen said he’s heard that the North Carolina legislature, which will convene next week, is considering some flexibility for early voting in affected counties, as well as resources to help these counties establish new voting sites and train up replacement poll workers. He believes the state can still manage a robust election if it provides proper support for local election boards—in other words, he said, “appropriate money.”

Political scientists have warned about the inevitability of an event like Helene subverting a national election.

But the challenge that eclipses all other voting accessibility issues is the simple fact that people who have been affected by a historic and deadly flood event typically aren’t thinking about where they will cast their ballots—they’re focusing on locating their loved ones, mucking out their houses, finding new housing, filing insurance claims, and dozens of other priorities that trump voting. 

The State Board of Elections in North Carolina has a website where residents can check their voter registration status, register a new permanent or temporary address, and monitor the progress of their mail-in ballot. But even if people wanted to find out where or how to vote, hundreds of thousands of customers in the state are currently without power, WiFi, and cell service. 

For years, political scientists who study the effects of climate change on political turnout have warned about the inevitability of an event like Helene subverting a national election. “Hurricane season in the U.S.—between June and November every year—usually coincides with election season,” a recent report by the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, or IDEA, said. “The chances of hurricanes disrupting US elections are ever-present and will increase as hurricanes become more common and intense due to climate change.” 

Prior to Helene, four elections were significantly disrupted by hurricanes in the 21st century: Hurricane Katrina in 2005, Hurricane Sandy in 2012, Hurricane Michael in 2018, and Hurricane Ian in 2022. The report by IDEA found that voter turnout can dip precipitously during these events.

“The biggest challenge that we see is not just technology failure, but a decrease in public confidence,” Vasu Mohan, a senior advisor at IDEA who has analyzed how disasters affect elections in dozens of countries, told Grist. “If you’re not prepared, then making last minute accommodations is extremely difficult.” However, Mohan’s research shows that it’s possible to conduct elections fairly after displacement events if communities are given the resources they need. 

“I am very, very worried about how [the storm] will affect voting,” said Abby Werner, a pediatrician who lives in Charlotte, a city in central North Carolina that did not sustain severe damage from the storm. Werner is a Democrat, and makes a point of voting in person. She fears the storm will suppress voter turnout. “In a series of worries, it is an additional wave,” she said. 

Brinson Bell’s office will likely face a flurry of lawsuits due to its handling of post-storm voting—it is already navigating a lawsuit, filed by Republican groups prior to the storm, over its handling of hundreds of thousands of voter registrations. But Brinson Bell said the COVID-19 pandemic and prior storms prepared the state for worst-case scenarios. “We held an incredibly successful election with record turnout during the Covid pandemic,” she said. “We’ve battled through hurricanes and tropical storms and still held safe and secure elections. And we will do everything in our power to do so again.”

This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Domonique Tomlinson didn’t know much about the Shore Acres neighborhood of St. Petersburg, Florida, when she bought a house here four years ago, but she learned fast. Just a few weeks after she moved into her single-story teal home, a high tide overwhelmed her street’s drainage system and pushed water into her house. The same thing happened again during Hurricane Idalia in 2023; she lost furniture and belongings worth thousands of dollars. Then there was just the everyday flooding to contend with. It happened more times than she could count, when she had to wade through calf-high water on her street to get to her teaching job, wiping herself with Lysol when she got to work.

Tomlinson and her husband were racing to install plywood flood panels and sandbags on Wednesday as Shore Acres prepared for a historic storm surge from Category 4 Hurricane Helene. As she loaded a Peloton into her car, she said she was fed up with flooding over and over again.

The following night, Helene delivered the largest storm surge on record to Shore Acres, pushing water not only into Tomlinson’s house, but into the houses of neighbors who had never flooded. Waiting out the storm on higher ground in downtown St. Petersburg, she kept up with reports from her neighbors who had stayed behind: The entire streetscape vanished as saltwater seeped in through sandbags and flood panels, filling up kitchens and living rooms.

“It’s just a really sad situation,” she told Grist. “We won’t rebuild, it’s not worth it.” 

“The realtors did not disclose that. We knew that the street flooded, but we had no idea the history of the house.”

Even before Helene, Shore Acres looked like a casualty of sea level rise and faulty development. The waterfront neighborhood had begun to flood multiple times a month, even when it wasn’t raining, and residents were paying some of the highest flood insurance rates in the country, with the median annual premium in the neighborhood set to reach around $5,000. The city was racing to mitigate the flooding, but almost every street in the neighborhood had at least one “For Sale” or “For Rent” sign on it. 

But Helene may turn out to be the neighborhood’s coup de grace: The hurricane pushed well over 6 feet of storm surge into Shore Acres on Thursday, the highest on record for the community. Based on early reports, the wall of water flooded hundreds of homes with 4 feet of water or more, dealing another hit to its already shaky real estate market. And as sea levels and flood insurance rates continue to rise throughout the eastern United States, from Florida to New England, Shore Acres may turn out to be not an outlier but a bellwether for future fragility in the real estate market and coastal economies more broadly. 

Shore Acres is one of numerous areas in the coastal United States that were built for a different climate than that of today: The area expanded in the 1950s on what one developer called “a pretty sorry piece of land” made up of pine forest and marsh, and much of it sits just a few feet above sea level. The area has always seen occasional flooding during the highest tides, but now parts of it go underwater several times a year as autumn tides slosh over bulwarks and gurgle up through storm drains. 

Even on sunny days, standing water is now a frequent occurrence in the neighborhood. When cars drive too fast through flooded streets, they create wakes that can splash up into driveways and damage other vehicles, or even rush into homes.

Tracy Stockwell, who moved to the neighborhood last year from Atlanta, has erected a series of signs and barriers in front of his house that read “Wake Stop” and “Slow Down, Watch Your Wake.” He said drivers have splashed through standing water multiple times and flooded his house—something he had no idea was possible when he bought it.

“The realtors did not disclose that,” he said, while preparing to ride out the storm on his second floor. “We knew that the street flooded, but we had no idea the history of the house.” Earlier this year, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, a Republican, signed a law that required home sellers to disclose past flood insurance claims, but the law doesn’t go into effect until next month.

As the flooding in the neighborhood gets worse, residents have seen their flood insurance rates skyrocket under a new federal policy. The Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, which administers the national flood insurance program that serves around 5 million US households, began to roll out this policy in 2022. The median cost of flood insurance in the neighborhood is around $2,000 per year, more than double the national rate, and may double again to around $5,000 as FEMA raises rates to phase in the new program. Many residents already pay far more than that.

Some neighbors have been able to save money on insurance costs by elevating their homes on stilts above flood level. Federal regulations require a homeowner to do this if their house suffers damage equivalent to more than half its value. But elevating a home requires a lengthy permitting process and can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars; moreover, FEMA’s new insurance pricing system offers a lower discount for doing this work than the old system did.

For people who can’t afford to elevate or can’t keep up with rising insurance rates, the only option is to leave, and as of Wednesday there were at least two dozen “For Sale” signs in the neighborhood. 

Even so, some local boosters are projecting confidence in the real estate market.

“I think people understand now that flooding is going to occur,” said Kevin Batdorf, a real estate agent and the head of the Shore Acres Civic Association. “Flooding in Shore Acres is well known. It’s not something that is a secret. Some people have sold, and the houses are selling, because we live in a great neighborhood.” He went on to say that the neighborhood has seen small selloffs in the past after flood events, but that the market always calms down after a few months as new people move in. 

“There’s so much more the city could do…and there are other communities that have solved the issue of flooding.”

But as Helene bore down, even those with deep connections to Shore Acres weren’t sure about their long-term future there. Tomlinson has said she won’t rebuild, and Stockwell said he planned to at least consider selling his home. They imagined their neighbors would be contemplating the same.

“That guy left, and that person left, and that person’s selling,” said David Witt, a furniture store manager, as he pointed at the houses on his street. He and his wife moved a few years ago into his wife’s childhood home, which is raised a few feet off the ground, and they’ve come within an inch of flooding several times. They are both attached to the home, Witt said as he lined his door with sandbags, but they aren’t sure if they want to stay for good.

There have been at least three other large floods in Shore Acres in the past 13 months, beginning with last year’s Hurricane Idalia and continuing this year with a no-name winter storm and Hurricane Debbie in August. The flood from Idalia damaged more than 1,200 homes in the neighborhood—close to half of all its structures. The neighborhood accounted for more than 80 percent of the damage St. Petersburg suffered during that storm. Helene traced a similar path to Idalia, scraping up the Gulf Coast and making landfall in the Florida Panhandle, but brought a storm surge several feet higher.

The city of St. Petersburg has invested millions of dollars over the past year to mitigate its flooding issue, installing backflow preventers that stop storm drains from overflowing onto streets when tides are high. It will soon begin construction on a $16 million pump station on the area’s lowest-lying street, Connecticut Avenue, replicating a strategy used in Miami Beach and New Orleans with money from the state government.

Batdorf, the civic association leader, said residents are working with the city to speed up these improvements and speed up grant programs that help residents elevate their homes.

“There’s so much more the city could do,” he said, “and there are other communities that have solved the issue of flooding.” He said that despite the city’s progress on installing backflow preventers, the sunny-day flooding issue hasn’t gotten better. Furthermore, there’s nothing the city of St. Petersburg could have done on its own to stop a storm the size of Helene. To mitigate such a surge would likely require a multibillion-dollar barrier of the kind the Army Corps of Engineers has contemplated building in Miami and New York City. 

“They’ve always had flooding here,” Witt said, “but it’s never been this bad.”

This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Domonique Tomlinson didn’t know much about the Shore Acres neighborhood of St. Petersburg, Florida, when she bought a house here four years ago, but she learned fast. Just a few weeks after she moved into her single-story teal home, a high tide overwhelmed her street’s drainage system and pushed water into her house. The same thing happened again during Hurricane Idalia in 2023; she lost furniture and belongings worth thousands of dollars. Then there was just the everyday flooding to contend with. It happened more times than she could count, when she had to wade through calf-high water on her street to get to her teaching job, wiping herself with Lysol when she got to work.

Tomlinson and her husband were racing to install plywood flood panels and sandbags on Wednesday as Shore Acres prepared for a historic storm surge from Category 4 Hurricane Helene. As she loaded a Peloton into her car, she said she was fed up with flooding over and over again.

The following night, Helene delivered the largest storm surge on record to Shore Acres, pushing water not only into Tomlinson’s house, but into the houses of neighbors who had never flooded. Waiting out the storm on higher ground in downtown St. Petersburg, she kept up with reports from her neighbors who had stayed behind: The entire streetscape vanished as saltwater seeped in through sandbags and flood panels, filling up kitchens and living rooms.

“It’s just a really sad situation,” she told Grist. “We won’t rebuild, it’s not worth it.” 

“The realtors did not disclose that. We knew that the street flooded, but we had no idea the history of the house.”

Even before Helene, Shore Acres looked like a casualty of sea level rise and faulty development. The waterfront neighborhood had begun to flood multiple times a month, even when it wasn’t raining, and residents were paying some of the highest flood insurance rates in the country, with the median annual premium in the neighborhood set to reach around $5,000. The city was racing to mitigate the flooding, but almost every street in the neighborhood had at least one “For Sale” or “For Rent” sign on it. 

But Helene may turn out to be the neighborhood’s coup de grace: The hurricane pushed well over 6 feet of storm surge into Shore Acres on Thursday, the highest on record for the community. Based on early reports, the wall of water flooded hundreds of homes with 4 feet of water or more, dealing another hit to its already shaky real estate market. And as sea levels and flood insurance rates continue to rise throughout the eastern United States, from Florida to New England, Shore Acres may turn out to be not an outlier but a bellwether for future fragility in the real estate market and coastal economies more broadly. 

Shore Acres is one of numerous areas in the coastal United States that were built for a different climate than that of today: The area expanded in the 1950s on what one developer called “a pretty sorry piece of land” made up of pine forest and marsh, and much of it sits just a few feet above sea level. The area has always seen occasional flooding during the highest tides, but now parts of it go underwater several times a year as autumn tides slosh over bulwarks and gurgle up through storm drains. 

Even on sunny days, standing water is now a frequent occurrence in the neighborhood. When cars drive too fast through flooded streets, they create wakes that can splash up into driveways and damage other vehicles, or even rush into homes.

Tracy Stockwell, who moved to the neighborhood last year from Atlanta, has erected a series of signs and barriers in front of his house that read “Wake Stop” and “Slow Down, Watch Your Wake.” He said drivers have splashed through standing water multiple times and flooded his house—something he had no idea was possible when he bought it.

“The realtors did not disclose that,” he said, while preparing to ride out the storm on his second floor. “We knew that the street flooded, but we had no idea the history of the house.” Earlier this year, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, a Republican, signed a law that required home sellers to disclose past flood insurance claims, but the law doesn’t go into effect until next month.

As the flooding in the neighborhood gets worse, residents have seen their flood insurance rates skyrocket under a new federal policy. The Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, which administers the national flood insurance program that serves around 5 million US households, began to roll out this policy in 2022. The median cost of flood insurance in the neighborhood is around $2,000 per year, more than double the national rate, and may double again to around $5,000 as FEMA raises rates to phase in the new program. Many residents already pay far more than that.

Some neighbors have been able to save money on insurance costs by elevating their homes on stilts above flood level. Federal regulations require a homeowner to do this if their house suffers damage equivalent to more than half its value. But elevating a home requires a lengthy permitting process and can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars; moreover, FEMA’s new insurance pricing system offers a lower discount for doing this work than the old system did.

For people who can’t afford to elevate or can’t keep up with rising insurance rates, the only option is to leave, and as of Wednesday there were at least two dozen “For Sale” signs in the neighborhood. 

Even so, some local boosters are projecting confidence in the real estate market.

“I think people understand now that flooding is going to occur,” said Kevin Batdorf, a real estate agent and the head of the Shore Acres Civic Association. “Flooding in Shore Acres is well known. It’s not something that is a secret. Some people have sold, and the houses are selling, because we live in a great neighborhood.” He went on to say that the neighborhood has seen small selloffs in the past after flood events, but that the market always calms down after a few months as new people move in. 

“There’s so much more the city could do…and there are other communities that have solved the issue of flooding.”

But as Helene bore down, even those with deep connections to Shore Acres weren’t sure about their long-term future there. Tomlinson has said she won’t rebuild, and Stockwell said he planned to at least consider selling his home. They imagined their neighbors would be contemplating the same.

“That guy left, and that person left, and that person’s selling,” said David Witt, a furniture store manager, as he pointed at the houses on his street. He and his wife moved a few years ago into his wife’s childhood home, which is raised a few feet off the ground, and they’ve come within an inch of flooding several times. They are both attached to the home, Witt said as he lined his door with sandbags, but they aren’t sure if they want to stay for good.

There have been at least three other large floods in Shore Acres in the past 13 months, beginning with last year’s Hurricane Idalia and continuing this year with a no-name winter storm and Hurricane Debbie in August. The flood from Idalia damaged more than 1,200 homes in the neighborhood—close to half of all its structures. The neighborhood accounted for more than 80 percent of the damage St. Petersburg suffered during that storm. Helene traced a similar path to Idalia, scraping up the Gulf Coast and making landfall in the Florida Panhandle, but brought a storm surge several feet higher.

The city of St. Petersburg has invested millions of dollars over the past year to mitigate its flooding issue, installing backflow preventers that stop storm drains from overflowing onto streets when tides are high. It will soon begin construction on a $16 million pump station on the area’s lowest-lying street, Connecticut Avenue, replicating a strategy used in Miami Beach and New Orleans with money from the state government.

Batdorf, the civic association leader, said residents are working with the city to speed up these improvements and speed up grant programs that help residents elevate their homes.

“There’s so much more the city could do,” he said, “and there are other communities that have solved the issue of flooding.” He said that despite the city’s progress on installing backflow preventers, the sunny-day flooding issue hasn’t gotten better. Furthermore, there’s nothing the city of St. Petersburg could have done on its own to stop a storm the size of Helene. To mitigate such a surge would likely require a multibillion-dollar barrier of the kind the Army Corps of Engineers has contemplated building in Miami and New York City. 

“They’ve always had flooding here,” Witt said, “but it’s never been this bad.”

This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Earlier this year, the e-commerce corporation Amazon secured approval to open two new data centers in Santiago, Chile. The $400 million venture is the company’s first foray into locating its data facilities, which guzzle massive amounts of electricity and water in order to power cloud computing services and online programs, in Latin America—and in one of the most water-stressed countries in the world, where residents have protested against the industry’s expansion.

This week, the tech giant made a separate but related announcement. It plans to invest in water conservation along the Maipo River, which is the primary source of water for the Santiago region. Amazon will partner with a water technology startup to help farmers along the river install drip irrigation systems on 165 acres of farmland. The plan is poised to conserve enough water to supply around 300 homes per year, and it’s part of Amazon’s campaign to make its cloud computing operations “water positive” by 2030, meaning the company’s web services division will conserve or replenish more water than it uses up.

The reasoning behind this water initiative is clear: Data centers require large amounts of water to cool their servers, and Amazon plans to spend $100 billion to build more of them over the next decade as part of a big bet on its Amazon Web Services cloud-computing platform. Other tech companies such as Microsoft and Meta, which are also investing in data centers to sustain the artificial-intelligence boom, have made similar water pledges amid a growing controversy about the sector’s thirst for water and power.

One recent estimate found that ChatGPT requires an average-sized bottle of water for every 10 to 50 chat responses it provides.

Amazon claims that its data centers are already among the most water-efficient in the industry, and it plans to roll out more conservation projects to mitigate its thirst. However, just like corporate pledges to reach “net-zero” emissions, these water pledges are more complex than they seem at first glance.

While the company has indeed taken steps to cut water usage at its facilities, its calculations don’t account for the massive water needs of the power plants that keep the lights on at those very same facilities. Without a larger commitment to mitigating Amazon’s underlying stress on electricity grids, conservation efforts by the company and its fellow tech giants will only tackle part of the problem, according to experts who spoke to Grist.

The powerful servers in large data centers run hot as they process unprecedented amounts of information, and keeping them from overheating requires both water and electricity. Rather than try to keep these rooms cool with traditional air-conditioning units, many companies use water as a coolant, running it past the servers to chill them out. The centers also need huge amounts of electricity to run all their servers: They already account for around 3 percent of US power demand, a number that could more than double by 2030. On top of that, the coal, gas, and nuclear power plants that produce that electricity themselves consume even larger quantities of water to stay cool.

Will Hewes, who leads water sustainability for Amazon Web Services, told Grist that the company uses water in its data centers in order to save on energy-intensive air conditioning units, thus reducing its reliance on fossil fuels. 

“Using water for cooling in most places really reduces the amount of energy that we use, and so it helps us meet other sustainability goals,” he said. “We could always decide to not use water for cooling, but we want to, a lot, because of those energy and efficiency benefits.”

In order to save on energy costs, the company’s data centers have to evaporate millions of gallons of water per year. It’s hard to say for sure how much water the data center industry consumes, but the ballpark estimates are substantial. One 2021 study found that US data centers consumed around 415,000 acre-feet of water in 2018, even before the artificial-intelligence boom. That’s enough to supply around a million average homes annually, or about as much as California’s Imperial Valley takes from the Colorado River each year to grow winter vegetables. Another study found that data centers operated by Microsoft, Google, and Meta withdrew twice as much water from rivers and aquifers as the entire country of Denmark. 

In Pennsylvania, one Amazon data center consumes about 20 percent of the electricity capacity of the nuclear power plant nearby.

It’s almost certain that this number has ballooned even higher in recent years as companies have built more centers to keep up with the artificial-intelligence boom, since AI programs such as ChatGPT require massive amounts of server real estate. Tech companies have built hundreds of new data centers in the last few years alone, and they are planning hundreds more. One recent estimate found that ChatGPT requires an average-sized bottle of water for every 10 to 50 chat responses it provides. The on-site water consumption at any one of these companies’ data centers could now rival that of a major beverage company such as PepsiCo. 

Amazon doesn’t provide statistics on its absolute water consumption; Hewes told Grist the company is “focused on efficiency.” However, the tech giant’s water usage is likely lower than some of its competitors—in part because the company has built most of its data centers with so-called evaporative cooling systems, which require far less water than other cooling technologies and only turn on when temperatures get too high. The company pegs its water usage at around 10 percent of the industry average, and in temperate locations such as Sweden, it doesn’t use any water to cool down data centers except during peak summer temperatures. 

Companies can reduce the environmental impact of their AI business by building them in temperate regions that have plenty of water, but they must balance those efficiency concerns with concerns about land and electricity costs, as well as the need to be close to major customers. Recent studies have found that data center water consumption in the US is “skewed toward water stressed subbasins” in places like the Southwest, but Amazon has clustered much of its business farther east, especially in Virginia, which boasts cheap power and financial incentives for tech firms.

“A lot of the locations are driven by customer needs, but also by [prices for] real estate and power,” said Hewes. “Some big portions of our data center footprint are in places that aren’t super hot, that aren’t in super water stressed regions. Virginia, Ohio—they get hot in the summer, but then there are big chunks of the year where we don’t need to use water for cooling.” Even so, the company’s expansion in Virginia is already causing concerns over water availability.

To mitigate its impacts in such basins, the company also funds dozens of conservation and recharge projects like the one in Chile. It donates recycled water from its data centers to farmers, who use it to irrigate their crops, and it has also helped restore the rivers that supply water-stressed cities such as Cape Town, South Africa; in northern Virginia, it has worked to install cover crop farmland that can reduce runoff pollution in local waterways.

The company treats these projects the way other companies treat carbon offsets, counting each gallon recharged against a gallon it consumes at its data centers. Amazon said in its most recent sustainability report that it is 41 percent of the way to meeting its goal of being “water positive.” In other words, it has funded projects that recharge or conserve a little over 4 gallons of water for every 10 gallons of water it uses. 

But despite all this, the company’s water stewardship goal doesn’t include the water consumed by the power plants that supply its data centers. This consumption can be as much as three to 10 times as large as the on-site water consumption at a data center, according to Shaolei Ren, a professor of engineering at the University of California, Riverside, who studies data center water usage. As an example, Ren pointed to an Amazon data center in Pennsylvania that relies on a nuclear power plant less than a mile away. That data center uses around 20 percent of the power plant’s capacity.

“If they are able to capture some of the growing water and clean it and return to the community, that’s better than nothing.”

“They say they’re using very little water, but there’s a big water evaporation happening just nearby, and that’s for powering their data center,” he said.

Companies like Amazon can reduce this secondary water usage by relying on renewable energy sources, which don’t require anywhere near as much water as traditional power plants. Hewes says the company has been trying to “manage down” both water and energy needs through a separate goal of operating on 100 percent renewable energy, but Ren points out that the company’s data centers need round-the-clock power, which means intermittently available renewables like solar and wind farms can only go so far.

Amazon isn’t the only company dealing with this problem. CyrusOne, another major data center firm, revealed in its sustainability report earlier this year that it used more than eight times as much water to source power as it did on-site at its data centers. “As long as we are reliant on grid electricity that includes thermoelectric sources to power our facilities, we are indirectly responsible for the consumption of large amounts of water in the production of that electricity,” the report said.

As for replenishment projects like the one in Chile, they too will only go part of the way toward reducing the impact of the data center explosion. Even if Amazon’s cloud operations are “water positive” on a global scale, with projects in many of the same basins where it owns data centers, that doesn’t mean it won’t still compromise water access in specific watersheds. The company’s data centers and their power plants may still withdraw more water than the company replenishes in a given area, and replenishment projects in other aquifers around the world won’t address the physical consequences of that specific overdraft.

“If they are able to capture some of the growing water and clean it and return to the community, that’s better than nothing, but I think it’s not really reducing the actual consumption,” Ren said. “It masks out a lot of real problems, because water is a really regional issue.”

This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Earlier this year, the e-commerce corporation Amazon secured approval to open two new data centers in Santiago, Chile. The $400 million venture is the company’s first foray into locating its data facilities, which guzzle massive amounts of electricity and water in order to power cloud computing services and online programs, in Latin America—and in one of the most water-stressed countries in the world, where residents have protested against the industry’s expansion.

This week, the tech giant made a separate but related announcement. It plans to invest in water conservation along the Maipo River, which is the primary source of water for the Santiago region. Amazon will partner with a water technology startup to help farmers along the river install drip irrigation systems on 165 acres of farmland. The plan is poised to conserve enough water to supply around 300 homes per year, and it’s part of Amazon’s campaign to make its cloud computing operations “water positive” by 2030, meaning the company’s web services division will conserve or replenish more water than it uses up.

The reasoning behind this water initiative is clear: Data centers require large amounts of water to cool their servers, and Amazon plans to spend $100 billion to build more of them over the next decade as part of a big bet on its Amazon Web Services cloud-computing platform. Other tech companies such as Microsoft and Meta, which are also investing in data centers to sustain the artificial-intelligence boom, have made similar water pledges amid a growing controversy about the sector’s thirst for water and power.

One recent estimate found that ChatGPT requires an average-sized bottle of water for every 10 to 50 chat responses it provides.

Amazon claims that its data centers are already among the most water-efficient in the industry, and it plans to roll out more conservation projects to mitigate its thirst. However, just like corporate pledges to reach “net-zero” emissions, these water pledges are more complex than they seem at first glance.

While the company has indeed taken steps to cut water usage at its facilities, its calculations don’t account for the massive water needs of the power plants that keep the lights on at those very same facilities. Without a larger commitment to mitigating Amazon’s underlying stress on electricity grids, conservation efforts by the company and its fellow tech giants will only tackle part of the problem, according to experts who spoke to Grist.

The powerful servers in large data centers run hot as they process unprecedented amounts of information, and keeping them from overheating requires both water and electricity. Rather than try to keep these rooms cool with traditional air-conditioning units, many companies use water as a coolant, running it past the servers to chill them out. The centers also need huge amounts of electricity to run all their servers: They already account for around 3 percent of US power demand, a number that could more than double by 2030. On top of that, the coal, gas, and nuclear power plants that produce that electricity themselves consume even larger quantities of water to stay cool.

Will Hewes, who leads water sustainability for Amazon Web Services, told Grist that the company uses water in its data centers in order to save on energy-intensive air conditioning units, thus reducing its reliance on fossil fuels. 

“Using water for cooling in most places really reduces the amount of energy that we use, and so it helps us meet other sustainability goals,” he said. “We could always decide to not use water for cooling, but we want to, a lot, because of those energy and efficiency benefits.”

In order to save on energy costs, the company’s data centers have to evaporate millions of gallons of water per year. It’s hard to say for sure how much water the data center industry consumes, but the ballpark estimates are substantial. One 2021 study found that US data centers consumed around 415,000 acre-feet of water in 2018, even before the artificial-intelligence boom. That’s enough to supply around a million average homes annually, or about as much as California’s Imperial Valley takes from the Colorado River each year to grow winter vegetables. Another study found that data centers operated by Microsoft, Google, and Meta withdrew twice as much water from rivers and aquifers as the entire country of Denmark. 

In Pennsylvania, one Amazon data center consumes about 20 percent of the electricity capacity of the nuclear power plant nearby.

It’s almost certain that this number has ballooned even higher in recent years as companies have built more centers to keep up with the artificial-intelligence boom, since AI programs such as ChatGPT require massive amounts of server real estate. Tech companies have built hundreds of new data centers in the last few years alone, and they are planning hundreds more. One recent estimate found that ChatGPT requires an average-sized bottle of water for every 10 to 50 chat responses it provides. The on-site water consumption at any one of these companies’ data centers could now rival that of a major beverage company such as PepsiCo. 

Amazon doesn’t provide statistics on its absolute water consumption; Hewes told Grist the company is “focused on efficiency.” However, the tech giant’s water usage is likely lower than some of its competitors—in part because the company has built most of its data centers with so-called evaporative cooling systems, which require far less water than other cooling technologies and only turn on when temperatures get too high. The company pegs its water usage at around 10 percent of the industry average, and in temperate locations such as Sweden, it doesn’t use any water to cool down data centers except during peak summer temperatures. 

Companies can reduce the environmental impact of their AI business by building them in temperate regions that have plenty of water, but they must balance those efficiency concerns with concerns about land and electricity costs, as well as the need to be close to major customers. Recent studies have found that data center water consumption in the US is “skewed toward water stressed subbasins” in places like the Southwest, but Amazon has clustered much of its business farther east, especially in Virginia, which boasts cheap power and financial incentives for tech firms.

“A lot of the locations are driven by customer needs, but also by [prices for] real estate and power,” said Hewes. “Some big portions of our data center footprint are in places that aren’t super hot, that aren’t in super water stressed regions. Virginia, Ohio—they get hot in the summer, but then there are big chunks of the year where we don’t need to use water for cooling.” Even so, the company’s expansion in Virginia is already causing concerns over water availability.

To mitigate its impacts in such basins, the company also funds dozens of conservation and recharge projects like the one in Chile. It donates recycled water from its data centers to farmers, who use it to irrigate their crops, and it has also helped restore the rivers that supply water-stressed cities such as Cape Town, South Africa; in northern Virginia, it has worked to install cover crop farmland that can reduce runoff pollution in local waterways.

The company treats these projects the way other companies treat carbon offsets, counting each gallon recharged against a gallon it consumes at its data centers. Amazon said in its most recent sustainability report that it is 41 percent of the way to meeting its goal of being “water positive.” In other words, it has funded projects that recharge or conserve a little over 4 gallons of water for every 10 gallons of water it uses. 

But despite all this, the company’s water stewardship goal doesn’t include the water consumed by the power plants that supply its data centers. This consumption can be as much as three to 10 times as large as the on-site water consumption at a data center, according to Shaolei Ren, a professor of engineering at the University of California, Riverside, who studies data center water usage. As an example, Ren pointed to an Amazon data center in Pennsylvania that relies on a nuclear power plant less than a mile away. That data center uses around 20 percent of the power plant’s capacity.

“If they are able to capture some of the growing water and clean it and return to the community, that’s better than nothing.”

“They say they’re using very little water, but there’s a big water evaporation happening just nearby, and that’s for powering their data center,” he said.

Companies like Amazon can reduce this secondary water usage by relying on renewable energy sources, which don’t require anywhere near as much water as traditional power plants. Hewes says the company has been trying to “manage down” both water and energy needs through a separate goal of operating on 100 percent renewable energy, but Ren points out that the company’s data centers need round-the-clock power, which means intermittently available renewables like solar and wind farms can only go so far.

Amazon isn’t the only company dealing with this problem. CyrusOne, another major data center firm, revealed in its sustainability report earlier this year that it used more than eight times as much water to source power as it did on-site at its data centers. “As long as we are reliant on grid electricity that includes thermoelectric sources to power our facilities, we are indirectly responsible for the consumption of large amounts of water in the production of that electricity,” the report said.

As for replenishment projects like the one in Chile, they too will only go part of the way toward reducing the impact of the data center explosion. Even if Amazon’s cloud operations are “water positive” on a global scale, with projects in many of the same basins where it owns data centers, that doesn’t mean it won’t still compromise water access in specific watersheds. The company’s data centers and their power plants may still withdraw more water than the company replenishes in a given area, and replenishment projects in other aquifers around the world won’t address the physical consequences of that specific overdraft.

“If they are able to capture some of the growing water and clean it and return to the community, that’s better than nothing, but I think it’s not really reducing the actual consumption,” Ren said. “It masks out a lot of real problems, because water is a really regional issue.”