ACR Journal

CMYK / .ai CMYK / .ai CMYK / .ai acrjournal.uk 33 SUSTAINABLE COOLING the cooling demand and its impact on energy demand risks a lack of ambition in policy, infrastructure and technology development that could have far-reaching social, economic and environmental consequences. Universal access to environmentally, economically and socially cooling is a multi-faceted challenge: In short - how do we meet the urgent global need for cooling for the benefit of all without overheating the planet? In order for a government or community to ensure that the cooling needs of their population are met sustainably - and track progress - they first need to understand what these needs are. To date, much analysis and projections of cooling demand have been based on models of GDP and population growth. These do not deliver access to cooling for the benefit of all who need it; instead, projections of those will be able to aord it. The most holistic current approaches to the challenge of sustainable global cooling tend to begin with the question: how many room air conditioners or fans are people going to buy (for thermal comfort), and how can this level of cooling be provided in the most eƒcient, clean and sustainable way? These global frameworks fail to address broader social dimensions of heterogeneous cooling needs, their implication on energy systems, as well as being unable to address people’s thermal practices, cultures and knowledge complexities. In fact, neither nationally nor globally, there has not yet been any robust, integrated assessment of what cooling demand will look like if we are to deliver access to aordable, sustainable cooling for the benefit of all. For example, how much cold-chain would be required to enable farmers’ incomes to double by 2025, or to end hunger and malnutrition and feed the world? Alternatively, how much cold-chain is needed to provide access to vaccines for all infants? Or how much cool comfort in buildings and transport would need to be provided to vulnerable populations to avoid heat stress associated illness or morbidity? In short, what needs must be met in a country or community if we are to meet the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) with no-one left behind? And, if we do not know this, we cannot quantify the potential environmental impact of Access to Cooling for the benefit of all who need it; nor can we properly mitigate demand; nor design optimised solutions and comprehensive Cooling Action Plans which meet the needs of all the people. And we cannot track progress in tackling the problem. Country scale cooling need-based research and modelling are still at their infancy, and there is a massive data inadequacy and a lack of standardised methodology on cooling needs assessment. Led by researchers at University of Birmingham and Heriot-Watt, we are developing a needs-based assessment of cooling based on a society’s cooling needs assessment aligned to the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. From this, we can then calculate what are the financial costs and environmental consequences of meeting these demands on a business as usual approach to understand the implications on a county’s Nationally Determined Contributions and carbon emissions. By quantifying and understanding the portfolio of needs as well as then the portfolio of energy resources, we can enable countries to develop optimum and “fit for the market” strategies, based on a merit order of intervention from demand mitigation through design (as simply as natural shading, ventilation and cool roofs) to harnessing untapped thermal resources through sorption chilling and other nascent technologies, the use of thermal energy storage (not just batteries) alongside deploying more energy eƒcient The CSC aims to make the most of clean and sustainable chilled distribution systems The energy demand for cooling could increase more than five times by 2050