Global Action Plan

Global Action Plan is a London-based UK environmental charity that has worked since 1993 on the social and political conditions for climate action — and that, through its Big Tech programme, has become one of the most active non-AI-identified civil-society organisations campaigning on the environmental footprint of large-scale AI infrastructure in the UK. Its premise on AI is that the build-out of hyperscale data centres — the building-scale facilities on which commercial AI systems physically depend — is a climate, water, and grid issue that should be subject to the same public scrutiny and environmental law as any other major infrastructure programme.

Founding and structure

Global Action Plan was founded in 1993 by Trewin Restorick as the UK arm of an international behaviour-change network. It is constituted as a registered charity in England and Wales (number 1026148) and Scotland (SC041260) and is run from offices in London with regional staff in Exeter, Brighton, and Nottingham. The organisation has around fifty staff and describes its method as bringing together "academic researchers, campaigners, educators, psychologists, community organisers, policy experts and more" to combine behaviour-change practice with systems-level advocacy.

Restorick led GAP for more than two decades. Sonja Graham, who joined the charity to design programmes including randomised controlled trials on home-heating behaviours, became CEO in 2015 and has since narrowed the organisation's priorities to the three current programme areas and expanded its campaigning capacity. The Chair of trustees is Chris Blake, with Sue Welland as Deputy Chair; the trustee board includes Martyn Williams (advocacy and campaigns), Katie Hill (post-consumerism and safeguarding), Advait Kuravi (climate justice), Karishma Gulrajani, Ken Penton, and Treasurer Jonathan Katz.

Programmes

GAP describes itself as working on three issues that engage publics beyond environmental specialists. Clean Air, led by Catherine Kenyon, runs school-, hospital-, and city-level work on air quality and is the historical heart of the charity's "behaviour change" programming. Transform Education, led by Claire Arnott, integrates climate and sustainability into UK schooling. Big Tech, led by Oliver Hayes, was added later and is the programme that connects GAP into the make-AI-good landscape.

Day-to-day campaigning is overseen by Larissa Lockwood as Director of Campaigns and Community Action, with Anisah Khan as Parliamentary Campaigns Manager. The organisation publishes its programme work as research-and-policy outputs paired with petitions, community-action infrastructure, and — increasingly through the Big Tech programme — strategic litigation.

Big Tech programme

The Big Tech programme grew out of GAP's work on how online environments shape public engagement with climate. Oliver Hayes, who joined GAP in 2019 after eleven years at Friends of the Earth (including the successful legal action against the Heathrow third-runway expansion), heads it as Head of Big Tech & Campaigns. Its early focus was the role of platform advertising and recommendation systems in slowing climate action: Hayes founded the international "End Surveillance Advertising to Kids" coalition and has been a core organiser within Climate Action Against Disinformation (CAAD) and the #PeopleVsBigTech coalition.

From 2024 onward the programme pivoted sharply onto AI-era physical infrastructure. GAP's framing — set out on its standing data-centres page — is that the UK government is accelerating planning approvals for hyperscale data centres without the disclosure, environmental assessment, or grid- and water-impact accountability that comparable infrastructure programmes would face, and that the public costs of AI infrastructure (electricity, water, climate) are being externalised onto communities whose grid capacity and water supplies the facilities draw on.

Stop Dirty Data Centres and the UK action days

GAP convenes a Stop Dirty Data Centres petition calling on the UK government to introduce a moratorium on AI data-centre construction until climate, grid, and water impacts are properly assessed, and maintains a public, work-in-progress map of proposed and approved UK data-centre sites. On 27-28 February 2026 GAP coordinated UK-wide "Dirty Data Centres" action days with twelve coalition partners, including Action to Protect Rural Scotland, Biofuel Watch, Corporate Europe Observatory, Foxglove, Friends of the Earth Wales & Northern Ireland, Global Justice Now, the local Friends of the Earth groups in Havering and Hillingdon, the Iver Heath Residents Association, London Mining Network, the North Ockenden Residents Association Against East Havering Data Centre, and Pull the Plug. The coalition explicitly pulled together resident-association networks already opposing specific local sites with national environmental NGOs and the Foxglove litigation team.

Foxglove judicial review of the Woodlands Park data centre

In August 2025 GAP and Foxglove co-launched a Section 288 statutory review of then-Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner's call-in approval of the 90MW Woodlands Park hyperscale data centre in Buckinghamshire — the Foxglove / Global Action Plan challenge to UK hyperscale data centres campaign in this corpus. GAP serves as co-claimant alongside Foxglove and is the environmental-charity face of the case. Hayes framed the launch in terms of public infrastructure priority-setting: "The UK Government must prioritise people over Big Tech profits and put the brakes on its AI agenda until the damaging environmental impacts are addressed." On 19 January 2026 the Government Legal Department conceded the case, accepting that the Secretary of State's decision contained a "serious logical error" on Environmental Impact Assessment screening and that the Woodlands Park approval should be quashed.

Water-security research

In April 2026 GAP published Not a drop to drink: How Britain's AI data centre surge threatens water security, co-authored with Kairos senior campaigner Nicole Sugerman. The report finds that 84% of proposed water-intensive UK data-centre developments are planned for areas already classified as water-stressed or projected to be water-stressed by 2040, that a single hyperscale data centre consumes water equivalent to the daily needs of around 10,000 people, and that under high-growth scenarios data centres could account for nearly 30% of new water demand in the Thames Water region. The report was covered widely in trade press including Water Magazine, and has become the campaign's headline evidence base on water alongside its CO2 numbers.

Posture in the AI-good movement

Global Action Plan is not an AI-identified organisation. It is an environmental charity whose three programme areas are Clean Air, Education, and Big Tech, and whose Big Tech work has — over roughly the 2024-2026 window — become a significant inbound channel through which UK climate, water, and resident-association publics are being engaged in scrutiny of AI infrastructure. That makes GAP a clear example of the corpus's "broader-portfolio with an AI-engaging programme" on-ramp: the Resist Big Tech programme is one of three issues the charity works on, but it is the layer through which non-AI audiences — Buckinghamshire residents near the Woodlands Park site, the Iver Heath and North Ockenden resident associations, climate campaigners in the broader Big-Tech-vs-climate coalition, and UK water-sector readers of the April 2026 report — are being recruited into AI-good organising.

GAP's pairing with Foxglove on Woodlands Park is the corpus's clearest current instance of a strategic-litigation organisation and a movement-organising environmental charity combining their strengths on AI infrastructure: Foxglove brings public-law capacity and the investigate-litigate-campaign method; GAP brings the environmental-charity register, the resident-association network, and a campaigning infrastructure that pulls AI-infrastructure scrutiny into a much wider climate-action constituency than a digital-rights organisation would reach on its own.