Cooling is a fast-growing industry, with a projected market value of $170bn by 2030. Cooling is central to human health and prosperity; ensuring access to nutritious food, critical medicines, and safe working and living conditions. However, cooling is also a significant contributor to climate change. The cooling sector needs to shift to net-zero emissions by 2050 to provide a climate safe world. This will require improved sustainable cooling policies, incentives, tools, innovations, and approaches with proactively shared knowledge that accelerates the mainstreaming of sustainable cooling.
Finance – both public and private – play an essential role in achieving a net-zero cooling pathway and providing cooling for all. Development Finance Institutions (DFIs) are key providers of catalytic finance, technical assistance, and, as standard setters, can deliver at the scale and speed necessary in achieving sustainable cooling for all whilst contributing to their alignment commitments to the Paris Agreement and the SDGs. Private sector investors, with assets under management representing several trillions of dollars globally, also have a critical role in delivering net zero cooling for all. Aside from the market opportunities created by sustainable cooling, for institutional investors, it would also contribute to their regulatory requirements to stress test and report on climate change risk.
This webinar, co-hosted by the Cool Coalition, Kigali Cooling Efficiency Program, and E3G, which can be viewed in full here, examined how finance can support the sustainable cooling agenda in an inclusive manner and how catalytic and institutional finance can work together to achieve net zero by 2050.