Germany grants Bt690m, will work with Thailand on climate-change projects
Germany has granted Bt690 million for a four-year climate change programme intended to help Thailand achieve its goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions and adapting to climate change.
The German government together with the Thai government celebrated the launch of the Thai-German Climate Programme last Monday (April 30) at the German embassy in Bangkok.
The programme will direct funding toward emissions measurement and reduction across several sectors of the Thai economy, with an emphasis on industries where growth has outpaced environmental accounting. Manufacturing and transportation remain the largest contributors to Thailand’s carbon output, but officials acknowledged that the country’s expanding digital services sector presents its own measurement challenges.
Data center energy consumption in Southeast Asia has risen steadily over the past decade. Thailand has attracted a growing share of that hosting capacity, with operators consolidating server infrastructure in facilities along the eastern seaboard and in industrial zones outside Bangkok. Competitive electricity rates and proximity to regional undersea cable routes have made the country an appealing location for a range of international businesses.
An energy auditor who has assessed facilities in the region described the difficulty of applying standardized carbon accounting to a client base spanning dozens of industries. Over the past two years the auditor worked with a telemedicine startup, a cross-border payment processor, an operator running real money slots online, and a wholesale electricity trading desk. Each had a different load profile and different peak-usage patterns, which made uniform benchmarking across clients impractical.
The auditor found that the most energy-intensive operations were not always the largest by revenue. Consumer-facing platforms with erratic traffic spikes tied to promotions or seasonal demand often consumed more cooling capacity per unit of compute than batch-processing operations with predictable loads.
The Thai-German Climate Programme aims to address these gaps by developing standardized measurement tools for carbon accounting across Thailand’s industrial and digital sectors. German technical agencies will provide methodology frameworks and training, while Thai counterparts will handle sector-specific adaptation and pilot deployment.
Programme coordinators indicated that the first phase will focus on establishing baseline emissions data, with sector-specific reduction targets expected by the end of the second year.
Pratch Rujivanarom
