GS Paper III
News Excerpt:
The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) led Cool Coalition has released a Global Cooling Watch report named “Keeping it Chill: How to meet cooling demands while cutting emissions”.
About the report:
- The report is released to support the Global Cooling Pledge, a joint initiative between the United Arab Emirates as host of COP28 and the Cool Coalition.
- It emphasizes that “Cooling is a double burden on climate change”.
- Rising demand for power-hungry equipment, such as air conditioners and refrigeration, will drive greater indirect emissions from the associated electricity consumption.
- At the same time, these emissions are compounded by direct emissions from the release of refrigerant gases in cooling equipment, the majority of which have a much higher global warming potential than CO2.
- To minimize the multiple and severe negative impacts of cooling growth, a rapid transition to sustainable cooling is needed.
Highlights of the report:
It lays out that sustainable cooling integrated action is needed in three key areas:
- Passive strategies to address extreme heat and reduce cooling demand in buildings and the cold chain:
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- Passive cooling measures can dramatically reduce cooling loads while maintaining indoor thermal comfort as well as temperatures in cold storage.
- Such passive cooling measures can curb the growth in demand for cooling capacity in 2050 by 24%, result in capital cost savings in avoided new cooling equipment of around US$1.5 trillion to US$3 trillion (2020 US$), and reduce 2050 emissions by 1.3 billion tons of CO2.
- Higher energy efficiency standards and norms for cooling equipment.
- To deliver a good amount of reduction, the global average efficiency of all cooling equipment operating in 2050 would need to be almost triple the average efficiency of equipment operating today.
- Driving efficiency in cold chain and refrigeration through MEPS and passive cooling can deliver 30% of the required energy savings by 2050 while greatly reducing food loss and waste.
- A phase-down of climate-warming hydrofluorocarbon (HFC) refrigerants at a faster rate than is required under the Kigali Amendment to the Montreal Protocol, while improving the energy efficiency of cooling equipment.
- If fully implemented, reduce the 2050 emissions from cooling by more than 60%.
- The emission reductions grow to 96% when these actions are combined with rapid electricity grid decarbonization.
Figure ES-1 illustrates the Business as usual (BAU) growth in cooling emissions between 2022 and 2050, together with a pathway to reduced emissions in 2050. This pathway has been developed as a viable way to achieve near-zero emissions from cooling and also provides significant cumulative energy and economic savings while expanding cooling access to the majority of vulnerable households in 2050.
Recommended Policy Actions:
Way Forward:
- Achieving near-zero emissions from cooling by 2050 is possible but requires a huge amount of policy interventions.
- The report identified that most countries have at least one national-level policy that is critical to driving the cooling sector to near-zero emissions. However, synergistic integration is lacking among these policies and other enabling activities related to space cooling, cold chains, the refrigerant transition, and finance for sustainable cooling.
- It is important for all nations to consider an integrated cooling policy framework for implementation that accounts for cooling emissions and their role in countries’ Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) under the Paris Agreement.
Prelims PYQ:
Q. The ‘Common Carbon Metric’, Supported by UNEP, had been developed for: (UPSC 2021)
(a) Assessing the carbon footprint of building operations around the world
(b) Enabling commercial farming entities around the world to enter carbon emission trading
(c )Enabling governments to assess the overall carbon footprint caused by their countries
(d) Assessing the overall carbon footprint caused by the use of fossil fuels by the world in a unit time.
