Cooling accounts for 7% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions. By 2050, greenhouse gases from air conditioning, fans and refrigeration could double, driven by what’s expected to be an exponential increase in demand from the developing world fueled by temperature increases, urbanization, growing populations and rising incomes.
Increasing access to cooling is urgent in developing countries, making clean cooling both a climate and a development challenge. High temperatures negatively affect productivity, with productivity loss due to heat expected to amount to the equivalent of 80 million full-time jobs by 2030. The lack of good cold chains — refrigeration and cold transport systems — to get vaccines to people contribute to 1.5 million deaths each year. Farmers’ and fishers’ ability to get products to market also is limited by lack of cold chains, which limits their economic advancement and their countries’ economic growth. And there are more than 420,000 deaths annually from food that’s spoiled due to the heat. At the same time, as climate change increases the intensity and frequency of health-threatening extreme heat, there is a growing need for cooling in classrooms, workplaces and homes.
Even meeting those kinds of needs, the projected doubling in emissions does not have to happen. The growing demand for cooling can be met by green approaches, including mechanical solutions like energy-efficient cooling equipment that uses lower amounts of greenhouse-gas-emitting refrigerants, and passive solutions that do not use energy at all, like “cool” (or solar-reflective) roofs and energy-efficient windows.
Working together, the World Bank Group, through our Energy Sector Management Assistance Program (ESMAP), and the ClimateWorks Foundation, through its Clean Cooling Collaborative (CCC, formerly the Kigali Cooling Efficiency Program), hatched an initiative to meet demand for cooling in environmentally friendly ways — identifying energy-saving opportunities and applying them around the world.
The World Bank Group is the largest multilateral funder of climate action in developing countries, financing hundreds of development projects, providing technical assistance for project implementation, and working with governments on public policy, including energy policy. The World Bank supports investment in clean energy solutions so that countries do not become locked into expensive, polluting infrastructure for decades. ClimateWorks, meanwhile, is one of the largest climate philanthropy intermediaries, with CCC drawing support from major foundations like the Hewlett, Oak and Pisces foundations. Through the partnership, ClimateWorks provided support and seed funding through a $3 million grant, to set up a program to develop a new, sustainable cooling business line at ESMAP.
The partnership with CCC is helping extend clean cooling activities across more World Bank projects. Together, ESMAP and CCC created a program that operates across the World Bank. The program identifies projects that can benefit from clean cooling solutions, develops and supports technical assistance, and raises awareness both inside the World Bank and among partner governments of the cooling needs of countries and appropriate solutions.
It is a partnership that illustrates the value of knowledge-sharing, collaboration and approaching challenges with open minds.
Expertise in a critical niche area
From the start, ESMAP saw CCC as a vital knowledge partner, not only a funder. Clean cooling is still a niche area, one in which CCC has expertise. The circle of clean cooling experts in the world is relatively small, even though cooling is a vitally important area. CCC, with its network of individuals and organizations that have specialized expertise across cooling-related sectors, helped open that world to ESMAP, and by extension, to the World Bank.
Having that knowledge and insight available made all the difference in our ability to hit the ground running. While the ESMAP team has deep expertise in energy and climate issues, building more clean cooling capabilities is sure to pay off, both in the immediate term and over the long term.
Along the way, CCC and ESMAP held structured and informal, ongoing dialogues. Quarterly deep dives were not just a time for updates, but a time for learning. We also participated in CCC meetings and knowledge events, and CCC did the same with us. Their understanding of practical opportunities on the ground grew, and so did our knowledge of clean cooling and awareness of experiences and learnings other CCC grantees were gaining.
In addition, CCC was willing to adapt its philanthropy in ways that would most effectively make use of World Bank assets. The partnership was pragmatic and opportunistic. CCC funded the ESMAP initiative as a program and not as an isolated project, allowing us to reach across the entire World Bank to inform and influence dozens of country initiatives. Along the way, CCC gave ESMAP leeway to discover and then act in areas with the greatest potential for impact, even if it meant shifting some thinking. We were able to go after specific, real-world opportunities based on real-world bank projects, unconstrained by preconceived notions about where impact would be greatest.
An ongoing push for clean cooling
With CCC support, ESMAP created the World Bank Efficient Clean Cooling Program in 2019. Now, the program has been institutionalized in ESMAP’s 2021-2024 business plan, continuing beyond the initial scope of ClimateWorks’ funding. The program has a healthy portfolio of over 30 funded activities and a growing pipeline in the health, agriculture, energy and urbanization sectors across the World Bank. It comprises over $600 million of World Bank financing for project components that include sustainable cooling-related investments. The program was also central to ESMAP’s COVID-19 response. In fact, in 2021, grants for investments and technical assistance supported nine client countries in addressing access gaps of cold chains in the delivery of vaccines.
The success of the Efficient Clean Cooling Program enabled the development of the World Bank Cooling Facility, one of the world’s first initiatives to focus on helping countries develop low-carbon and inclusive cooling solutions. The facility mobilized $157 million from the Green Climate Fund (GCF). ESMAP will support the operations of the facility, which will channel concessional climate finance from the GCF to cofinance Bank Group-financed operations in nine countries across agriculture, health and space cooling. Financing mobilized from the GCF is expected to leverage an additional $722.8 million in World Bank financing, reduce carbon dioxide emissions by an estimated 16.2 million tons, and support countries’ climate adaptation efforts.
Amid multiple global crises — the war in Ukraine, COVID-19, surging inflation, and setbacks in development — global climate action has been stalling, with dangerous consequences for people’s lives and livelihoods. We at the World Bank also worry about the slow pace of global climate action. Initiatives like the Efficient Clean Cooling Program and the mobilization of climate finance for a multicountry cooling facility, are more important than ever. So are partnerships that blend resources and expertise in ways that compound reach and impact, as the program has done.
Martina Bosi is Senior Climate Change and Energy Specialist at the World Bank Group’s ESMAP Efficient, Clean Cooling Team