Sustainable Energy led Climate Action for Inclusive Cooling
Channel: SELCO Foundation
Date: 2022-10-13

As temperatures increase around the world, cooling is emerging as a new, basic need in all walks of life. The lack of adequate ‘cold chains’ of refrigerated warehousing and transport causes two million vaccine preventable deaths each year, and the waste of 200 million tonnes of food. Cooling affects the supply of food, medicine and other resources. Cooling is a crucial solution for tackling poverty, hunger, health and climate change. However, the cooling solutions available today primarily respond to a society where supply of energy is not a constraint. If the existing cooling solutions are deployed in order to meet urgent demands of the most vulnerable, it will not only result in future burden (due to unoptimised solutions), but also result in increased pressure on the planet due to increased emissions. According to one estimate, refrigeration and air conditioning cause 10% of global CO2 emissions – three times more than that from aviation and shipping combined. Since most of India’s energy systems are centralised and run on dirty, expensive fuels, innovations in clean cooling technologies and efficiency in cooling could provide cooling at lower environmental and financial cost. 
SELCAP’s decentralised, renewable energy solutions address these energy gaps in cooling for rural business and lifestyles. Using SDG 7 - Affordable and Clean Energy - as a catalyst, SELCAP is helping people tackle two of the major threats of our times - Climate Change and Inequality.