Chilling Prospects 2026 Links Rising Heat Mortality to Persistent Cooling Access Gaps

Chilling Prospects 2026, Sustainable Energy for All’s (SEforALL) annual global assessment of cooling access, was launched on 27 August in partnership with the UNEP Cool Coalition, bringing renewed attention to the growing intersection of extreme heat, mortality and unequal access to cooling. Under UNEP’s Cool Talks banner, the launch convened experts from Article 25, HERA, the International Energy Agency (IEA), and Mahila Housing Trust (MHT) to examine the scale of the cooling access gap and the policy, finance, design and community solutions needed to protect those most exposed to rising temperatures.

Opening the session, Lorena de Carvalho Araújo, Passive Cooling and Energy Modelling Specialist at the UNEP Cool Coalition, framed access to cooling as a question of health, equity and resilience, stressing that vulnerability to extreme heat is shaped by factors including age, occupation, income and gender. She highlighted the need for context-specific combinations of passive design, nature-based solutions, low-energy cooling and efficient air conditioning, matched to local climate, infrastructure and affordability. “Solutions need to be designed around people and local realities, with policy and finance addressing affordability and access from the beginning,” she said.

Giorgia Pasqualetto, Senior Specialist, Energy Efficiency and Cooling at SEforALL, presented Chilling Prospects 2026, setting out the report’s latest evidence on cooling access, heat vulnerability and mortality. Across 77 heat-exposed countries, the analysis estimates that 339 million rural poor and 746 million urban poor are at high risk of lacking adequate cooling, while a further 2.43 billion lower-middle-income people face medium risk. It also identifies 12 countries that rank among both the 20 with the highest current heat-death rates and the 20 facing the largest projected increases in heat mortality. “There is an urgent case to invest in electricity access and reliable electricity infrastructure today to build resilience and protect people in the long term,” Pasqualetto said. Countries including Burkina Faso, Chad, Djibouti, Mali, Niger, Pakistan and Sudan sit at the sharpest convergence of rising heat mortality, low projected air-conditioning ownership and persistent electricity access gaps. 

With the report’s global findings established, the discussion shifted to how those risks are experienced on the ground and what equitable cooling responses look like in practice. The panel discussion on equitable approaches to passive and active cooling solutions opened with Mary McBryde, Chief Program Officer at HERA, who focused on the disproportionate burden borne by women, particularly the estimated 770 million women working in the informal economy. Caregiving responsibilities, maternal health risks, heat-exposed livelihoods and limited access to shade, water and cooling can combine to deepen both health and financial vulnerability. “They need an integrated set of solutions that address systemically and on the ground level the impacts that they’re experiencing from a health and a livelihood perspective,” McBryde said, stressing that responses must also be faster and more targeted. She pointed to women head-loaders whose daily earnings can fall from around 300–500 rupees to 60–70 rupees during extreme heat or heavy rain, and highlighted interventions ranging from cooling shelters and market shade to heat early warnings and parametric insurance designed to offset heat-related income losses.

Siraz Hirani, Director Programs at MHT, argued for a “living lab” approach in which communities define, test and refine interventions before they are scaled, noting that eight out of ten cooling innovations observed by MHT remain stuck at pilot stage. “When solutions are designed or co-created by keeping community in the center, there is automatically ownership for that solution,” Hirani said. He pointed to community-designed interventions that have moved from pilot to policy, including a cool bus stop in Ahmedabad that is 5–6°C cooler and serves more than 600,000 commuters, and a net-zero cooling station in Jodhpur that has sheltered more than 18,000 people and achieved an average temperature reduction of 7.7°C. The Jodhpur pilot subsequently informed national cooling-centre guidelines and state-level budget allocations in India.

Taking the discussion from community-led adaptation into the built environment, Toby Pear, Associate Architect at Article 25, focused on the role of passive design in reducing heat exposure before mechanical cooling is needed. “When designing as architects, as engineers, we should often look first to what’s been done before,” Pear said, pointing to traditional building approaches that evolved over generations to suit local climates but are increasingly being displaced by materials and construction methods poorly adapted to extreme heat. Drawing on Article 25’s work at Collège Amadou Hampaté Bâ in Niger, he showed how building orientation, local laterite stone, thermal mass and climate-responsive roof design can substantially improve indoor comfort without mechanical cooling. Alternative roof forms tested in the Sahel have demonstrated indoor temperature reductions of up to 8°C, while ongoing work is examining how these designs can also reduce construction costs and be replicated at scale.

Closing the panel, Fabian Voswinkel, IEA Energy Policy Analyst, focused on the relationship between efficiency, affordability and access. IEA analysis shows that global electricity demand for space cooling has grown by 50% since 2015 to around 2,900 TWh, while market research found that in Southeast Asia and Latin America two air conditioners can be available at the same price even when one is twice as efficient as the other. Yet access to efficient equipment remains highly unequal. “The efficient equipment isn’t even being shipped to these countries. So these people wouldn’t have the access even if they wanted to,” Voswinkel said of some sub-Saharan African markets. He also directed participants to the IEA’s recent analysis, Cooling a Hotter World, which examines the implications of rapidly rising cooling demand for power systems and consumers.