A Cool World: Accelerating the journey to Sustainable Cold-Chain for the Global South

The Global South faces significant challenges in adapting to climate change and building resilience against future climate shocks, not least in response to rising seasonal temperatures and more frequent, prolonged heat extremes. Impacts on food production and supply, the distribution and storage of medicines, vaccines and other health products, and thermal comfort and safety, if unmitigated, will have severe consequences for nutritional well-being, physical and mental health, productivity in work and study, economic output, financial well-being, and mortality.

Well-adapted clean cooling provision and cold-chains are critical to mitigating these impacts by reducing individual and collective vulnerability, addressing heat related climate risks, and building resilience into the future. The international “A Cool World: Sustainable Cold-Chain for the Global South” conference being held at the University of Birmingham on 28^th – 29^th October this year (2025) aims to kick-start collaborative thinking and action to rapidly deliver holistic, affordable, sustainable, and resilient cooling and cold-chain (and other energy services through integration) to all, as well as identify supporting research, trade and commercial opportunities.

Getting hotter in the Global South

In 2023, Africa experienced extreme heat conditions^[1], with the north of the continent measuring record breaking temperatures during a hot summer heatwave (for example Algeria and Morocco recorded peaks of 48°C and 47.5°C respectively) and simultaneously nations in the south enduring a prolonged winter heatwave that many described as effectively extending summer into a year-round season. Botswana, Namibia, Mozambique and South Africa all maintained winter temperatures in the high 30°Cs and Malawi recorded values 20°C above the seasonal average. Adrar also experienced Africa’s hottest night on record in July, when temperatures did not fall below 39.6°C. Last year, the warmest recorded to-date^[2], Asia experienced an intense spring heatwave, summer temperatures in May approached 50°C in India^[3], and, emphasising the trend into the future, UNEP’s Emissions Gap report^[4] predicted that current policy commitments will result in a 3.1°C increase in the global mean surface temperature compared to pre-industrial levels over the course of the century.

In a world of rising temperatures and more severe heat extremes, it is the Global South that will be disproportionately impacted, not only in terms of its exposure to higher temperatures, but also because of the high level of vulnerability to heat of its populations, built environment, infrastructure, and multiple critical systems, ranging from food production and supply to healthcare provision and digital services. Cooling and cold-chain infrastructure will be at the core of solutions for adapting and building resilience to these increasingly hostile conditions, taking a central role as critical infrastructure for safeguarding food security, health, life and livelihoods. Not just any cooling, however. As our “Living in a +50°C World” report^[5] published last year unequivocally showed, to ensure a successful outcome for humans and the future habitability of our planet, cooling solutions will need to be clean cooling solutions. In short, they must: 

• 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;
• integrate effectively with broader energy and infrastructure systems, creating synergies that enhance efficiency.

Accelerating the Global South’s uptake of clean cooling

Despite a clear, indisputable need, clean cooling and cold-chain solutions are not being financed and implemented at the required scale, nor in a holistic and inclusive manner, on-the-ground in the Global South. Why is that? What are the key issues? What are the risks of inaction? And, most importantly, what can be done – practically and tangibly - to address them? 

Sustainably delivering clean cooling at scale for all who need it faces many barriers to progress, particularly in the context of the specific multi-faceted challenges to the deployment of such solutions in the rural Global South. Not least of these 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, maintenance and repair. As a global community of practice, those of us working in cooling must conceive of, and deliver, radical, practical, truly transformative solutions to meet cooling needs sustainably and inclusively.  We must adopt an inclusive, multi-disciplinary approach that considers not only the technological innovations, but also the socio-economic and environmental challenges that are essential to address to enable their widespread adoption. This will require collaboration across geographies and sectors, careful design of scalable business models, and strategic investments in infrastructure and skills development.

The Roadmap to a Cool World

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 application-focused research necessary to turn it into practice at scale.   We have teams building virtual models to design complete systems and test innovations as well as delivering on-site and on-vehicle data gathering capabilities in the field to provide key in-country operational data.  We are testing disruptive supply chains for vaccines combining drones and blood-spotting techniques; building first-of-a-kind Community Cooling Hubs (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 step is to bring together sectoral experts in science, engineering, governance, finance, business and community systems, amongst others, to define realisable actions and processes for accelerating the Global South’s uptake of clean cooling and cold-chain. This will include considering the technical feasibility and capability of practical delivery at scale as well as the required interventions and complementing actions, such as building consumer awareness, social capital, financing mechanisms and policy interventions to make it all possible. To this end we aim to develop an integrated system roadmap through to 2050 showing a viable pathway to widespread adoption in the rural Global South and highlighting the sequencing and timings for a merit order of interventions along with the required research and innovation pipeline.

To drive this step forward, our two-day workshops based at the international conference at Birmingham University will catalyse collaborative thinking on how, as a community, we can provide holistic, sustainable, affordable, and resilient cooling and cold-chain services to all. Crucially, we will be exploring how we can embed this approach quickly enough to avoid locking-in cooling emissions for years and decades ahead, as well as identifying the research required to fill current knowledge gaps and the trade and commercial opportunities that will emerge for the Global South and North alike. 

The event will have collaboration at its core, bringing together cooling users, academics, development agencies, NGOs, technology developers, industry, entrepreneurs, and investor groups from around the world to share ideas, develop thinking, make connections, and establish co-operative partnerships for future action. Workshops will form parallel tracks focused on a wide range of community, policy and technology topics, from technology testing and demonstration, systems design and modelling, manufacture and assembly, innovation and research, and training needs for capacity building, through to finance and business models, social capital and building inclusive resilient communities, and policies and strategies for cooling as critical national infrastructure. To join us and help accelerate the adoption of clean cooling and cold-chains in the Global South, register via this link and we will look forward to welcoming you to Birmingham in October.