By Degrees aims to promote, explore and stimulate debate around the role of cooling as critical infrastructure, ensuring societal well-being, economic stability, and public health; adapting and mitigating the impacts of extreme heat to climate change.
Latest Articles
Equitable and inclusive cold-chains – putting the vision into practice
25th Sep 2025
The key question we have laid down at CCN is: "How do we unlock Africa’s agricultural potential to feed itself and the world whilst also economically empowering smallholder farmers and making them climate-resilient … all without using diesel?"
World Ozone Day
16th Sep 2025
The availability of trained engineers and technicians with the skillsets required to design, install, commission, operate, maintain and safely decommission clean cooling equipment, holds paramount importance in facilitating its widespread adoption.
The science of food freezing
9th Sep 2025
Why freeze food, what's the process and what factors affect storage life? Prof. Judith Evans details all this, as well as how ACES can support the development and adoption of a well-designed, optimised, sustainable cold-chain for frozen food in Africa.
Zombie appliances
5th Sep 2025
Refrigerated appliances that are dumped in often unregulated markets are termed "zombie appliances''. Prof. Judith Evans discusses their impact and what ACES are doing to support more energy-efficient options.
Cold-chain deployment: Questions from history
3rd Sep 2025
Dr Ed Hammond, who is working with the Clean Cooling Network on our design of equitable and sustainable Community Cooling Solutions for Africa, looks at some questions from history in terms of cold-chain deployment.
Making the cold-chain and clean cooling cool for schools
21st Aug 2025
Bringing cold-chain awareness into schools is about more than just teaching science. It’s about linking lessons to the food we eat, the vaccines we take, and the changing climate that we live in.
Cooling isn’t just nice to have; it is central to a modern civilisation
19th Aug 2025
Celebrating cooling through the Festival of Cooling. Without reliable ways of transporting food in a cooled environment, food arrives at its destination spoiled, sales are lost, and the livelihoods of farmers, fishers and other producers suffer. These stories are repeated across Rwanda and across Sub-Saharan Africa time and time again.
Frozen food: Is it an opportunity for smallholder farmers in the Global South?
15th Aug 2025
Dr Tim Fox, Dr Leyla Sayin and Professor Toby Peters argue that sub-zero cold-chains for frozen foods need to be central to the discussions at October's: "A Cool World: Sustainable Cold-Chain for the Global South" conference.
Building Africa’s resilience through cold-chain training for Global Health
13th Aug 2025
ACES’ One Health team - Jean Pierre Musabyimana, Hugor Shema and Ariane Mutabaruk - explore "Building Africa’s Resilience through Cold-Chain Training for Global Health"; one of the plenary topics to be covered at October's conference.
Is the cold-chain driven by need or greed?
12th Aug 2025
Dr Ed Hammond, specialist in refrigeration system design and development, asks the question: "Is the cold-chain driven by need or greed?" Did developed countries really have a greater need for cooling than the Global South?
A cool world: Accelerating the journey to sustainable cold-chain for the Global South
11th Aug 2025
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.
Sharing the power of visualisation to affect change – ACES’s Visual Storytelling Course
8th Aug 2025
This two-month course empowers Rwandan and Kenyan students with the tools and insights to become visual storytellers - using photography not just for documentation, but as a powerful form of media advocacy.
ACES is building the skills base needed for sustainable refrigeration in Rwanda and beyond
6th Aug 2025
Here at ACES, we provide a range of practical, hands-on training courses and programmes that use advanced refrigeration facilities to replicate the real-world systems that engineers and technicians will encounter in the field.
Learning with ACES/CCN is taking off fast and innovative training is at its core
5th Aug 2025
At ACES, programme participants are not only trained to become fully equipped technicians/engineers capable of handling sophisticated technical tasks in the industry, but also developed into forward thinkers able to tackle pressing climate change issues and social challenges.
From food value chains to value webs
1st Aug 2025
At the CCN, we believe it’s time to embrace a new perspective: food systems behave less like a straight line and more like a complex network or "value web" - a system of interlinked value chains supporting joint production, processing, and exchange of products for multiple purposes.
“Born in Rwanda but pan-Africa in vision”
28th Jul 2025
The Africa Centre of Excellence for Sustainable Cooling and Cold-chain (ACES) was conceived to increase and accelerate the adoption and uptake of resilient, efficient, inclusive and climate-friendly cooling and cold-chain.
Shared value, inclusive business models are key for resilient, stable communities
25th Jul 2025
A core pillar of the Africa Centre of Excellence for Sustainable Cooling and Cold-Chain (ACES) is to develop new community-based business models and approaches which create and deliver shared value equitably to all participants.
Cool spaces and addressing inequity in provision
24th Jun 2025
Although urbanisation is projected to continue increasing in the decades ahead, it is estimated that approximately half of the world’s stock of buildings that will exist through to the middle of the 21st Century has already been constructed.
From loss to resilience: Building Rwanda’s cold-chain for inclusive food system transformation
10th Jun 2025
PART 2 - In this two part article we consider three interdependent pillars critical to developing an effective and efficient cold chain system in Rwanda.
From loss to resilience: Building Rwanda’s cold-chain for inclusive food system transformation
5th Jun 2025
PART 1 - In this two part article we consider three interdependent pillars critical to developing an effective and efficient cold chain system in Rwanda.
Clean Cooling offers a path to resilience in Rwanda and beyond
19th May 2025
As countries across sub-Saharan Africa work to adapt to climate change, Rwanda is focusing on one of the lesser-known but critical challenges: access to resilient, efficient, affordable, inclusive and climate-friendly sustainable cooling and cold-chain.
The role of ACES in delivering agriculture transformation
11th May 2025
The Clean Cooling Network (CCN) is a global initiative “born in Rwanda” with a mission to make sustainable, resilient and equitable cooling and cold-chain a cornerstone of development.
Cold-chain infrastructure: A cornerstone of Rwanda's agricultural transformation
7th May 2025
Rwanda's ambitious five-year strategic plan for agriculture (PSTA 5) charts a course for significant strides in agricultural GDP growth.
Urban nature-based solutions – Reducing the cooling load
30th Apr 2025
Integrating nature-based cooling solutions into city planning and landscaping will be a key approach in mitigating the urban cooling load.
Cold-chain 2050 – 25 years of substantial change ahead?
11th Mar 2025
Refrigeration systems over the last 25 years have predominantly been vapour compression based1 and this core technology has not changed from the traditional direct expansion and overfeed systems.
Extreme heat, its impact on sport, and solutions for venue design
21st Feb 2025
High temperatures limit when we can play and consume sport and increasingly frequent and intense heatwaves are changing how we design sporting venues.
Adapting Africa’s food system to rising temperatures
18th Feb 2025
A bold action agenda with targets to improve food security, increase productivity, reduce post-harvest losses and stimulate investment in agriculture research, innovation and scaling of adoption.
The gig economy – high temperatures, inequity and vulnerability
31st Jan 2025
The gig economy is a rapidly expanding sector of the labour market globally and is characterised by short-term contracts and freelance assignments.
Passive cooling - A traditional approach that needs much greater uptake
17th Jan 2025
Passive cooling refers to a set of design principles and techniques that utilise natural processes to help maintain comfortable indoor temperatures without the need for active systems.
Rwanda: A journey of discovery and sustainable progress
4th Dec 2024
Rwanda, like much of Sub-Saharan Africa, faces the dual challenges of food insecurity and climate vulnerability. Rwanda is working tirelessly to build sustainable systems.
Living in a +50°C world - The system roadmap
3rd Dec 2024
Clean cooling and cold-chain solutions are not being implemented at the required scale on-the-ground in the Global South. What can practically be done to address them?
Community cooling for community services
3rd Dec 2024
We intend to build a first of a kind test and demonstration Community Cooling Hub (CCH) unit at the ACES campus, Kigali.
The rise of electric vehicles and implications for the cold chain
18th Nov 2024
Transport accounts for around a third of global carbon dioxide emissions, with about 3/4 of transport emissions come from road transport.
Keeping cool in the future demands new questions now
30th Oct 2024
Cooling is critical infrastructure essential for food, health, safe places to live and work, and the production and storage of data that defines our modern world.
Improving the resilience of refugee camps to rising temperatures
29th Oct 2024
Ahead of COP29 and the discussions on adaptation, IMechE Fellow Dr Tim Fox outlines solutions to the challenges of adapting refugee camps for improved resilience to extreme heat.
Caught in an unsustainable evaluation trap?
16th Oct 2024
Very few sustainable evaluation methods are designed to produce meaningful evidence of the sustainable consequences of a proposed intervention.
Self-organising virtual models to build cold-chain solutions
9th Oct 2024
Climate change introduces unprecedented uncertainty and ever-greater threats to the resilience of the global food supply chains, particularly in the global South.
Unlocking the potential of gender equality and social inclusion in cold-chains
19th Sep 2024
GESI is not just a moral imperative; it is crucial for driving innovation, increasing efficiency, and building resilience in the cold-chain space.
The cold economy
1st Jun 2024
Lack of cooling and cold-chain access is a critical development challenge that has significant implications for people’s livelihoods, productivity, health, food, and nutritional security.
