At the heart of Israel’s environmental challenges lies a paradox. It is a highly developed country, globally recognized for technological excellence and innovation, with ambitions to lead in advanced computing, artificial intelligence, data centers, clean energy, and climate technologies.
At the same time, it suffers from deep and persistent gaps in basic environmental infrastructure: waste management, public transportation, wastewater treatment, electricity grids, and the protection of open spaces. These two realities are unfolding simultaneously – and increasingly, they collide.
Regional hub
Israel’s technological prowess is undeniable. The country is positioning itself as a hub for data centers that support high-performance computing and AI, serving domestic, regional, and European markets.
This ambition carries major implications for energy demand. Electricity demand in Israel has increased at an annual average of 2.3% in recent years, with current projections indicating an acceleration to an average annual growth rate of 3.5% through 2050 – an extraordinary rate for a small, dense country.
The challenge is not only producing more electricity. It is about system reliability, flexibility, and resilience. Data centers require uninterrupted, high-quality power.
At the same time, Israel is undergoing parallel transitions: rapid growth in electric vehicles, electrification of industry, and expanding desalination to cope with climate-driven water stress – all of which are energy-intensive. These pressures are unfolding in a country with one of the highest population growth rates in the developed world.
What makes this picture especially striking is that Israel has world-leading climate and clean-technology companies addressing many of these challenges. Israeli firms are developing cutting-edge solutions to global needs in energy efficiency, water management, storage, transportation, and digital infrastructure.
Israeli company ZutaCore, for example, has developed advanced waterless cooling technology that dramatically reduces energy and water use in data centers – exactly the kind of solution needed to reconcile AI growth with climate and resource constraints. Other Israeli companies are pioneering smart grid management, advanced battery systems, precision water reuse, and low-carbon mobility solutions.
Weak infrastructure
Yet here lies a critical problem: Israel’s weak environmental infrastructure limits the ability of its own climate-tech companies to scale domestically. Gaps in grid capacity, public transportation systems, waste treatment facilities, and regulatory frameworks mean that many innovations cannot be deployed at a meaningful scale inside Israel.
As a result, companies are often forced to test, pilot, and commercialize their technologies abroad. This shrinks the domestic market, slows learning and iteration, and ultimately makes it harder for Israeli climate-tech firms to grow into global leaders. The gap between innovation and infrastructure is therefore not only an environmental failure but also an economic and strategic one.
Nowhere is this tension clearer than in Israel’s electricity system. The transmission grid is not prepared for the pace of growth in demand or for large-scale integration of renewables, storage, and decentralized energy management.
Technological solutions exist, but infrastructure constraints, planning delays, and regulatory barriers often prevent their deployment. Israel risks becoming a country with world-class energy technologies but insufficient capacity to use them effectively.
An analysis carried out by the Institute for National Security Studies (INSS) has found that Israel’s electricity system remains highly centralized, with limited transmission capacity, making it vulnerable to security threats, climate extremes, and system failures.
Despite a national target of 30% renewable electricity by 2030, only around 7,000 MW of the roughly 17,000 MW required are currently connected to the grid, largely due to infrastructure constraints.
Waste management
Waste management is another example. Much of Israel’s waste is sent to landfills, many of which are nearing capacity. Landfilling uses up valuable resources, pollutes soil and water, and creates long-term environmental and health risks. In a country with such technological capabilities, one would expect rapid progress toward separation at source, advanced treatment, recycling, recovery, and reuse. Instead, the gap between knowledge and implementation remains wide.
The scale of the problem is stark.
According to a 2024 Taub Center analysis, some 80% of municipal waste in Israel is sent to landfills, roughly double the OECD average, while waste generation per person is significantly higher than in most developed countries. The consequences are clear: around 13,000 waste fires a year, burning about 250,000 tons of waste annually, with serious impacts on air quality, soil, and water.
Wastewater tells a comparable story. Israel is celebrated as a global leader in wastewater reuse for agriculture. Yet in recent years, treatment capacity has struggled to keep pace with population growth and rising demand. This creates pollution risks for rivers and aquifers and undermines the system’s resilience – precisely when climate change is increasing droughts, heat waves, and water scarcity.
Visible failures
Public transportation is perhaps the most visible infrastructure failure. Decades of underinvestment in mass transit have produced chronic congestion, air pollution, and lost productivity. While electrifying private vehicles is important, it cannot replace efficient, accessible public transportation. Without structural change, Israel will continue to pay a high environmental, economic, and public health price.
All of these gaps converge in the continuous loss of open spaces and biodiversity. This is often misframed as a luxury issue. In reality, open spaces are life-support infrastructure. They regulate temperature, reduce flooding, protect soil and water sources, provide buffer zones, and support physical and mental health. When these systems collapse, the state must invest heavily in artificial substitutes. Nature is not free; it is critical infrastructure. A small, fast-growing country cannot afford to lose it.
Climate change intensifies all these pressures. Extreme heat, extreme weather, and shifting rainfall patterns are no longer future risks – they are current realities. They amplify every existing weakness and make clear that closing infrastructure gaps is not enough. Infrastructure must be climate-resilient by design.
National action
Addressing the gap between technological leadership and missing infrastructure requires coordinated national action. Priorities include strengthening and modernizing the electricity grid, decentralizing energy systems, and enabling large-scale integration of renewables and storage.
Israel needs comprehensive waste legislation that mandates separation, treatment, and recycling before landfilling, laying the foundation for a circular economy. Farmers should be supported in adopting regenerative practices, alongside statutory protection of ecological corridors in high-pressure development areas. And Israel needs a binding national climate law with clear mitigation and adaptation targets and mechanisms for climate risk management across government.
Despite these challenges, there is reason for optimism. Israel has repeatedly demonstrated its capacity to mobilize, innovate, and act decisively. The technology exists. The expertise exists. The understanding is growing. The task now is to close the gap between innovation and infrastructure – not only to protect the environment but to enable Israel’s climate-tech leadership to flourish at home as well as abroad.■
Galit Cohen is the Israel director of Jewish Climate Trust, and a senior visiting fellow at the Institute for National Security Studies. She is also the former director general of Israel’s Ministry of Environmental Protection.