Chilling Prospects: Tracking Sustainable Cooling for All 2019 is the second report in the Chilling Prospects series and serves as a follow-up to the inaugural report’s wake-up call and call to action. The findings outlined in this year’s report shows that 1.05 billion people face serious cooling access risks.

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The challenges these at-risk populations face include:

• In 52 high-risk countries, 365 million people in rural areas and 680 million people in urban slums are at risk due to poor rural areas without access to safe food and medicines and poor urban slums with little or no cooling to protect them in a heatwave.
• 2.2 billion people present a different risk, a rising, lower-middle class in developing countries, who are only able to afford cheaper, less efficient air conditioners, which could spike global energy demand and have profound climate impacts.
• Across the 52 high-risk countries, at least 3.2 billion people face cooling access challenges in 2019. 

Sustainable Energy for All (SEforALL) works with leaders in government, the private sector and civil society to drive further, faster action toward the achievement of Sustainable Development Goal 7 (SDG 7), which calls for universal access to sustainable energy by 2030, and the Paris Agreement, which calls for reducing greenhouse gas emissions to limit climate warming to well below well below 2° Celsius (and striving for 1.5° Celsius). 

This report highlights some of our most important interventions in 2018 such as the fourth SEforALL Forum in Lisbon, which brought together over 800 leaders from business, government and civil society around the theme of “Leaving No One Behind” in the energy transition; the design meeting of the SEforALL Electrification Accelerator; the publication of the second annual Energizing Finance: Understanding the Landscape report; the launch of a flagship sustainable cooling report, Chilling Prospects, during the High-level Political Forum at UNHQ in New York in July 2018. 

In 2018, new work evolved responding to demands for addressing the relationship between energy access and health, as well as the energy needs of displaced populations. New strategic partnerships were formed with businesses, international organizations, foundations, universities and UN agencies.

Also see:

Annual Report 2018 Annex - Monitoring Review

Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning Framework (MEL Framework)

Financial Audit Report 2018

Policies reviewed in this report include:

• Minimum Energy Performance Standards (MEPS) for air conditioners
• Minimum Energy Performance Standards (MEPS) for refrigerators
• Building efficiency codes
• Urban heat island policies
• Cold chains

The current cooling demand consists of both met and unmet demands (‘needs’) for cooling. Very few readily available data exist in the second category, the lack of access to cooling. We know that in 2016 an estimated 1.06 billion people lacked access to electricity. Most of these populations are based in developing countries, predominantly in Sub-Saharan Africa and Asia. A large number of those dealing with energy-poverty, estimated at approx. 80%, live in rural areas, with 2016 data showing a 96% overall access rate for urban areas and a 73% rate for rural areas.

The report assesses the cooling demands in buildings, in cities and in cold chains.

Cold chains consist of several components, typically including at least pre-cooling, cold storage, and refrigerated transport.

Within most countries, it is common to find at least three different types of fresh food value chains, involving cold chain components to a smaller or larger degree. These include individual producers, who sell surpluses on the local market; groups of producers producing for domestic markets, who may combine their products and pay for cooling for highly valued products; and export marketers, who produce for overseas markets and must follow international standards for packing, cooling and shipping.

For temperature-sensitive medicines such as vaccines, the main components of the cold chain comprise cold storage and refrigerated transport.

This document discusses technical cold chain solutions as well as policy and business models to provide low-cost, low-to-no energy solutions for agricultural and medical cold chains.

Reducing or preventing the urban heat island effect as well as reducing the need for active cooling solutions such as air conditioning to cool buildings and vehicles in urban areas will require a rethinking of conventional urban planning and design.

This may include measures such as reducing the surface area occupied by dark-colored parking spaces and roads as well as increasing the amount of vegetation cover; applying lighter colored materials, coatings and paintings to create cool roofs and cool pavements; and smartly using urban form and density to promote natural ventilation as well as a reduction in heat build-up. In addition, cities can leverage district-level opportunities to provide efficient cooling at scale.

Several policy examples and business models are presented in this document.

Cooling solutions for buildings discussed in this report include:

• Potential technological solutions such as increasing AC efficiency, passive cooling, fans in solar homes systems, and green building initiatives
• Potential policy and business model solutions such as Strengthening of Minimum Energy Performance Standards (MEPS), passive cooling policies, electricity pricing, public-private partnerships as well as pay-as-you-go models

Electricity access enhances access to quality essential health care services while making health systems more resilient. In the education sphere, access to electricity enables lighting and extended studying hours; facilitation of information, communication and technology (ICT); enhanced staff retention and teacher training; among other benefits. This report uses case studies to shed light on what kind of off-grid solar delivery models in health care and education contribute to—and, likewise, hinder—sustainability. The purpose of the report is to help decision makers in the public and private sector design sound off-grid electrification projects for rural schools and health centers by helping them evaluate the most effective and appropriate delivery model for their specific country context.

See also: Webinar on contributes to the sustainability of solar PV systems in health clinics and schools in Africa and Asia

This analysis looks at development finance flowing towards the energy sector and the barriers to disbursement of these funds. The overall aim is to understand these flows (where are they going, to do what), to quantify possible delays or under-disbursement and to identify underlying patterns where possible.