Cooling Beyond Cities: Scaling Rural Space Cooling and Thermal Comfort

Cooling the Last Mile maps 13 space cooling solutions across passive and active categories and assesses their applicability through a seven-criteria framework covering climate performance, ease of implementation, supply chain resilience, and end-of-life impacts. Presenting the findings, Florencia Azar Sales, Energy Access Research Analyst at Energy Saving Trust, explained that “Passive measures are lower cost, applicable to off-grid contexts, and reduce the heat load so that when active solutions are needed, they become more effective and more affordable.” Azar Sales also highlighted strong potential for cross-regional adaptation, pointing to techniques such as the China mosaic cool roof used in India, which could be transferred to similar climatic contexts in sub-Saharan Africa. At the same time, she cautioned that active cooling remains critical in certain settings, particularly healthcare facilities and during extreme heat events, and that significant R&D is still needed to design solutions appropriate for rural households rather than adapting products built for urban markets.

From landscape mapping, the discussion shifted to implementation realities. In India, heat stress is already disrupting agricultural value chains, dairy yields, poultry operations, and silk production. Huda Jaffer, Director of SELCO Foundation, argued that cooling must be understood as directly linked to productivity, income, and working conditions, not treated as a separate sectoral concern. “The main problem today is that you have separate climate action plans, separate cooling action plans, and separate livelihood plans. The convergence piece becomes extremely crucial,” Jaffer noted. She emphasised that technology alone is rarely the binding constraint. The gaps more often lie in business models, supply chain development, and the integration of cooling into existing government financing schemes for agriculture and micro-enterprise.

While the potential for a 99.5% global reduction of HFCs by 2050 is well established in the climate community, the benefits for the people most affected by heat are less visible in those conversations. Denise San Valentin, Programme Management Officer at the Climate and Clean Air Coalition (CCAC) suggested reframing the agenda "By giving more thought to a people-centric approach to achieve greater impacts, because we are not just talking about indirect benefits from environmental protection, but strategies that directly benefit people.” San Valentin outlined CCAC-supported projects including a solar-powered cold room demonstration in Siaya County, Kenya, targeting fisherfolk and small-scale traders on the shores of Lake Victoria, as well as clean cold chain policy development in Punjab and integrated food systems interventions in Armenia.

Even where the right technology reaches the right community, however, adoption can still fail if trust and operational systems are not in place. Drawing on experience in Guinea-Bissau, Simran Singh, Sustainable Finance Specialist at BASE Foundation, described how BASE entered a new market not through high-tech cold rooms but through clay pot coolers, conducting field experiments with farming communities to demonstrate how passive cooling extended the shelf life of their crops. “Many projects fail not because the technology does not work, but because communities have not yet seen in extremely tangible terms the benefits of cooling," noted Singh. Once that foundation of trust was established, demand for larger active cold rooms followed naturally. Singh also referenced Coldtivate, a digital tool developed by BASE that standardises cold room operations, tracks payments and cold room composition by commodity type, and integrates temperature data to estimate the remaining shelf life of each crate in store, effectively scaling the farmer's power to negotiate a fair price.

Rounding up the panel, Bea Varnai, Project Manager for Climate Resilient Housing at Geres, drew attention to the fact that operational tools address part of the challenge, but reaching rural households in the first place requires a different kind of infrastructure. In Myanmar, Geres has supported the launch of Ah Lin Tan, a network of approximately 200 women entrepreneurs who distribute energy-efficient appliances, solar products, and housing solutions to rural households. The organisation is now adding thermal retrofit services to the network's scope, introducing low-cost, low-tech improvements to existing housing designed with and for the communities they serve. "The main barrier to scaling such solutions does not lie in technical innovation but in bridging knowledge and awareness gaps, material availability, and financial affordability," explained Varnai. She further emphasised the role of the women distributors not only in raising awareness of thermal comfort and related health issues but also in connecting households with local craftsmen and providing payment facilities that reduce financial barriers to adoption, for instance through bulk purchasing arrangements that bring down costs.