Living in a +50°C World - The System Roadmap

Despite a clear, indisputable need, clean cooling and cold-chain solutions are not being implemented at the required scale on-the-ground in the Global South. Why is that? What are the key issues? And, most importantly, what can practically be done to address them? The “Living in a +50°C World - The System Roadmap” project, developed and led by Toby Peters, Professor of Cold Economy, University of Birmingham, aims to find out, answer these important questions, and provide a roadmap for scaling up clean cooling and cold-chain systems where they are needed most. That is as critical infrastructure to ensure resilience, equity, and opportunity in response to a rapidly warming world.

With a global mean surface temperature 1.46°C above the pre-industrial baseline, 2023 was confirmed as the warmest year observed in a 174-year series stretching back to 1850. Indeed, reacting to unprecedented heatwaves across the northern hemisphere in the summer and record breaking monthly mean temperatures, the UN’s Secretary-General António Guterres announced in July of last year that “the era of global warming has ended” and “the era of global boiling has arrived”. That month sat within a period from June to August when over 3.8 billion people (more than half the world’s population) were exposed to climate change induced extreme heat. As the summer progressed, monthly records were consistently exceeded and in addition to the all-time high in the low 50°Cs measured in China (52.2°C), temperatures in the upper 40°Cs were experienced for prolonged periods across the southern United States, northern Mexico, Europe, north Africa, Asia and Japan. Simultaneously, in the southern hemisphere, Australia, South America and southern Africa experienced exceptionally warm winters, with the latter enduring a prolonged heatwave that many described as effectively extending the sub-continent’s summer into a year-round season. 

This year has been no different, with Asia experiencing an intense spring heatwave, summer temperatures in May approaching 50°C in India, and over 1,400 temperature records being broken in simultaneous heatwaves occurring on five continents in the third week of June. In fact, as 2024 reaches it’s close, the year is now widely expected to have been even hotter than 2023 and potentially the first on record to have a global mean surface temperature above 1.5°C. This at a time when the latest UNEP Emissions Gap report, published in October, predicted that current policy commitments will result in a 3.1°C (in a range 1.9 – 3.8) increase in that temperature compared to pre-industrial levels over the course of the century. And it is the Global South that will be disproportionately impacted, not only in terms of its exposure to higher temperatures, but also due to the vulnerability of its populations, built environment, infrastructure, and multiple critical systems for human survival, ranging from food production and supply to healthcare provision and digital services. 

In response to this hot reality, the Global South will need to adapt and build resilience. Cooling and cold-chain infrastructure will be at the core of solutions, playing a critical role in safeguarding food security, health, life and livelihoods. But not just any cooling. Our recently published Living in a +50°C World report unequivocally showed that to ensure a successful outcome for humans and the planet, cooling solutions deployed in an adaptation and resilience building strategy will need to be clean cooling solutions.

According to the UNEP, cooling technologies, such as refrigeration, air conditioning and fans, currently account for about 20% of the overall electricity used worldwide and as a result of future growth in demand for cooling (the number of cooling appliances could increase to 9.5 billion globally by 2050 from today’s 3.6 billion), largely due to population increases combined with growing affluence levels in the Global South, this figure is expected to more than double by 2050. Additionally, cooling is responsible for 7% of all GHG emissions and it is estimated that by 2030 these emissions could double in value, possibly triple by 2100. Moreover, hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) are the fastest-growing source of GHG emissions in the world because of the increasing global demand for space cooling and refrigeration. However, it should be noted that despite the large-scale increase in cooling provision projected to take place by 2050, it is anticipated that access to cooling for all that need it to adapt to rising temperatures will still not be a reality at that time. In fact, providing cooling for all by 2050, on a business-as-normal approach, would potentially require 14 billion active cooling appliances worldwide, which is 3.8 times as many appliances as are in use today.

Clean cooling solutions will be essential to meet these climate change mitigation related challenges and create an optimised, sustainable, resilient, efficient, low-carbon outcome for the global energy system, whilst at the same time avoiding unnecessary supply pressures on power grid infrastructure (including new peak demands) and installed renewable energy capacity, as well unnecessary GHG emissions. In short, these solutions will need to: 

• be accessible and affordable to all, financially sustainable, scalable, safe and reliable;

• be resilient to higher seasonal ambient temperatures, extreme heat events, and other climate change related shocks;

• contribute towards achieving society’s goals for greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions reduction, natural resource conservation, air quality improvement, and sustainable development. 

Traditional power grid-based cooling systems composed of air-conditioning units, chillers and refrigeration plant will, in the short-term, continue to be a part of the solutions mix and as such it is imperative that their efficiency be dramatically improved. However, this will not be enough to sustainably deliver cooling at scale for all who need it, particularly in the context of the specific multi-faceted challenges to the deployment of such solutions in the rural Global South. Not least of which is a widespread lack of strong, robust electricity grid infrastructure, along with in many cases an inadequate understanding of viable business models, insufficient availability of accessible financing options, and skills deficits in engineering that impact on equipment installation, operation, servicing and maintenance. As a community of practice in cooling, we must conceive of, and deliver, radical, practical, truly transformative solutions to meet cooling needs sustainably and inclusively, not just now, but in 20-30 years’ time. What will these solutions be based on? What will they look like? How will they be adopted at scale? In answering these questions, we will need to back-cast to today from 2050, and potentially beyond, to define the steps needed to get there. 

This will necessarily include “thinking thermally”, taking a whole systems approach, and envisioning completely new systems enabled by novel, innovative technologies and disruptive approaches. For example, the use of: rapidly deployable, flexibly configured, drones and active portable vaccine coolers to service remote rural communities, instead of vulnerable, high emission, traditional vaccine distribution cold-chain infrastructure, which in many cases does not exist; Community Cooling Hubs (CCHs) to meet a wide range of rural cooling needs across multiple sectors; novel cooling servitisation, or impact driven, business models; and waste thermal energy to meet fast growing thermal demands.

Ultimately, to achieve truly transformative cooling and cold-chain solutions for the Global South, we must adopt an inclusive, multi-disciplinary approach that considers not only the technological innovations, but also the socio-economic and environmental challenges that must be addressed to enable their widespread adoption. This will require collaboration across sectors, careful design of scalable business models, and strategic investments in infrastructure and skills development. 

While the priority and much of the work to date of the Clean Cooling Network has been to establish the facilities and tools to explore, test, validate and drive on-the-ground change, we are already leading the radical thinking required and undertaking the research necessary to turn it into practice at scale. We have teams building virtual models to design complete systems and test innovations – at the same time we are putting in place on-location and on-vehicle data gathering capabilities to provide key in-country operational information. We are testing disruptive supply chains for vaccines combining drones and blood-spotting techniques; building first-of-a-kind CCHs; and developing new business models, as well as understanding and addressing the impact, policy and financing landscape.

Building on the foundational work we have done so far, our next most significant step is to bring together (from within, and external to, the Network) sectoral experts in the science, engineering, governance, finance, business and community systems domains, amongst others, to: 

• assess the entire opportunity space for systemic as well as sub-system change, exploring the full scope of solutions available; and

• define the system of realisable actions and processes to develop the cooling and cold-chain solutions that meet the needs of today, without compromising the environmental, societal and economics system on which future generations will depend to meet their own needs. 

This will include considering the technical feasibility and capability of practical delivery at scale, along with the required interventions and complementing actions, including building the consumer awareness, financing mechanisms and policy interventions to make it all possible.

To this end we will undertake a five-stage process initially focused on the challenges of cold-chain and rural cooling. 

The first stage will be using our work to-date to return to first principles and confirm at a macro level how much cooling (heat removal) would be required for rural communities to: provide environments to comfortably live, study, work and play; deliver food from source to fork ensuring no volume and/or quality losses; and enable universal healthcare access and deliver life-saving vaccines and medicines from manufacturer to arm, without compromising safety and effectiveness. All within the wider context of growing population numbers and constraints such as finance, energy access, and resource availability, etc.

Thereafter, we will focus on exploring a wide range of potential solutions for different applications. In this regard, through collaboration with experts across technical, financial, business, social, and policy domains, we aim to refine these options in terms of their feasibility, paying particular attention to their engineering, manufacturing and supply chain needs. From there, we will short-list options that maximise benefits across multiple dimensions - environmental, social, and economic - while also considering practical considerations such as implementation, financing, and long-term sustainability.

Finally, in stage five, an integrated system roadmap through to 2050 will be developed, including understanding potential sequencing and timings the merit order of interventions, and the innovation pipeline, and this will be presented within a new report showing a viable pathway to widespread deployment in the rural Global South. First findings from the work will be presented at the Institution of Mechanical Engineers’ 2^nd International Conference on Climate Change Adaptation and Resilience, taking place in London, UK, on 14^th – 15^th October next year, and the report will be published for COP30, November 2025– 21 November 2025.

Behind the report’s analyses will be considerable work and throughout the project the team will need to be continuously vigilant for new solutions, either in the form of emerging technologies or approaches, and to integrate those with real practical potential. To aid this process, and to inform the work more broadly, we will be establishing a Roadmap Working Group composed of key globally recognised sectoral experts, with deep knowledge and innovative thinking, from industry, business, finance, professional bodies, NGOs, academia, research institutions, and the policymaking community. 

More broadly, early next year we will establish a wide-ranging ‘Community of Practice’, open to all in the clean cooling community who wish to join it. The development and growth of the latter will be supported by a new webinar and podcast series, which will not only be an opportunity for followers to learn more about the work of the project as it progresses, but also provide a platform for Community of Practice members to widely share new insights, technologies and thinking, as well as catalyse discussions, conversations and debates on how we are going to solve the cooling conundrum for Living in a +50°C World. 

To kick-off the work the first in the new series of webinars will be held at 12:00 -12:45 GMT on Thursday 23^rd January 2025, featuring a conversation between Dr Tim Fox, Dr Leyla Sayin, and guests, on the aims, ambitions, aspirations and objectives of the project, along with practical information on how to get involved and stay informed of developments. Registration for the webinar is now open.

For further info please contact Dr Leyla Sayin.