Today, we are faced with immense challenges in delivering food that is affordable, nutritious, and safe whilst providing optimal returns to farmers, as well as and minimizing environmental and climate impacts.
Cold chains are vital to help the food system deliver against those challenges, but their operations can have significant environmental impacts. For example, the food cold chain alone is responsible for a third of hydrofluorocarbon (HFC) emissions, or 1% of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, and these HFC emissions are expected to increase significantly in proportion by 2050.
Increasing access to affordable and climate-friendly cold chains technologies and systems is vital for the achievement of both climate and sustainable development goals. There already exist opportunities for countries to leapfrog to net zero cold chain infrastructure and, by doing so, to significantly reduce the GHG emissions while ensuring access to cooling services.
In this session, experts from the field discussed a newly published brief on “Net Zero Cold Chains For Food”, highlighting the building blocks of net zero cold chains and sharing insights on how we can move towards an integrated approach to net zero cold chains.