Delivering Energy Efficient and Climate Friendly Cooling through National Cooling Action Plans

On World Ozone Day in 2019, the UN Secretary-General António Guterres released a message calling upon countries to develop National Cooling Action Plans (NCAPs) to deliver efficient and sustainable cooling and bring essential life‐preserving services like vaccines andsafe food to all people while driving climate action.

Many countries are developing NCAPs to coordinate action on energy efficiency and the HFC phase down, and to proactively address their growing cooling needs while reducing the climate impact of cooling practices, improving access to cooling and addressing several Sustainable Development Goals. NCAP helps countries to identify synergies and deliver against three internationally agreed goals simultaneously––the Paris Climate Agreement, Sustainable Development Goals, and Kigali Amendment to the Montreal Protocol––while pursuing national priorities and socioeconomic benefits.

Several of these NCAP pioneers joined forces within the framework of the Cool Coalition to create a NCAP Methodology that covers cooling comprehensively, including all relevant sectors and end-uses (space cooling in buildings, mobile AC, cold-chain and refrigeration), and considers access to cooling for all. The NCAP Methodology is a uniform guide map for NCAP development that can be readily adapted to fit a country’s specific context and national priorities. It has two distinct elements: an overarching NCAP Development Methodology that lays out the sequence of activities involved, including guidelines, good practices, and available resources where applicable, and NCAP Data Assessment Frameworks which give in-depth view into the data gathering and analysis.

The Methodology was developed by Alliance for Energy Efficient Economy (AEEE) under the leadership of Cool Coalition, UN ESCAP, and K-CEP together with members of the NCAP Working Group - UNDP, UNEP-U4E, Energy Foundation China, World Bank Group, GiZ, CLASP, Birmingham University, SEforALL. AEEE was able to bring in the experience from India’s Cooling Action Plan as a major building block of this work because of its comprehensive approach and coverage of all sectors. Other important building blocks included SEforALL’s needs assessment and the29 NCAPs developed by members of the Cool Coalition NCAP Working Group facilitated by K-CEP.

Cool Coalition together with various partners is organising a series of events between June and September 2021 to launch this comprehensive methodology and build capacity among national policy-makers and stakeholders on developing and implementing National Cooling Action Plans in various regions of the world.

You can register for the Asia and the Pacific NCAP Workshop led by ESCAP and UNEP here.