Help us accelerate deployment of sustainable cold-chains in the Global South and deliver a Cool World
This month sees "A Cool World: Sustainable Cold-Chain for the Global South" taking place at the University of Birmingham in the UK, a landmark international conference organised by the Clean Cooling Network (CCN). The aim of the two-day October 28th – 29th event is to catalyse collaborative thinking and action for accelerated delivery of fully integrated, affordable, sustainable, resilient and inclusive cooling and cold-chains (and other energy services through integration) in the developing countries of the world. By joining us you can contribute to making this aim a reality, as well as identify opportunities for research, trade and commercial activity, network with like-minded delegates from near and far, and plan strategic interventions that will benefit all involved.
Why is “A Cool World” so important?
The Global South faces significant development challenges while at the same time needing to address high costs of capital and a gathering perfect storm of climate shocks, biodiversity loss, rising debt distress, trade uncertainty, economic instability, and large-scale demographic changes. Successfully navigating a sustainable and resilient pathway to a future proofed, prosperous and inclusive outcome requires leading-edge, innovative thinking, extensive meaningful collaboration, deep commitment, and rapid on-the-ground action with impact. That is why A Cool World is so important.
Cold-chains are vital to achieving development goals and underpin food security, positive health outcomes, economic growth, and societal stability in the modern world. They are largely taken for granted in the Global North, where they form an unseen critical infrastructure continuously delivering nutritious good quality food, temperature-sensitive medicines and vaccines, and financial returns for investors, operators and other stakeholders. In the Global South, however, it’s a different situation; not only is cold-chain infrastructure not seen (quite literally in many cases, due to its absence), it is also commonly fragmented, lacking the integration necessary for ensuring a consistent temperature-controlled environment for the safe custody of products from their place of origin to their place of consumption or use.
The reality of inadequate cold-chain provision in the developing countries of Africa, Asia, South America and the Pacific is food insecurity leading to hunger and poor nutritional intake, lost income to farmers, fishers, rural communities and their stakeholders, and degraded medicines and vaccines resulting in unnecessary disease, illness and poor health outcomes. In Sub-Saharan Africa, for example, more than 37% of its food production is lost between the point of production/sourcing and the consumer, depriving people of nutrition and farmers of income, while simultaneously 25% of vaccines are wasted globally due to temperature related loss of efficacy, largely in the Global South. And as climates change and temperatures rise, both seasonal ambient and the peaks associated with more frequent, prolonged heatwaves, in the absence of adequate cold-chains these issues will only increase.
Africa has more than 60% of the world’s uncultivated arable land, and with 60% of the continent’s population under 25, this represents a substantial opportunity for food production and economic growth. However, given the level of Africa’s food losses, if this opportunity is taken and today’s inadequate distribution infrastructure is not upgraded to include fully integrated cold-chains, much of what results will, in reality, be a missed opportunity. Future proofing the financial, human and resource investment in this additional food production to alleviate the continent’s nutritional deficits and hunger, as well as to drive development forward, clearly demands a parallel investment in modern cold-chains.
But, crucially, cold-chains don’t just reduce product losses by preserving perishable food and temperature sensitive medicines and vaccines, they enable economic value addition to take place in rural communities. They achieve this through facilitating the adoption of food processing, packaging, and branding opportunities, turning harvested produce into market-ready, nutritious products for more people. In doing so, communities can capture an increased share of the food system’s value and their cold-chains becomes an engine of growth, driving higher incomes and investments in rural economies, creating new jobs across farming, logistics, and processing, and building more resilient livelihoods.
Globally, farmers capture only about 25% of food value chains, and in Africa, limited processing means just $40 of value is added per tonne of produce - five times less than in high-income countries. By enabling better post-harvest management to ensure local storage, improved produce quality, and food processing, farmers and cooperatives can create branded products, from juices to dried fruits. In this way, they can shift from being price-takers to price-makers, help build competitive agro-industries that earn foreign exchange, and strengthen resilience. Doing so also helps the continent address its youth employment agenda. With such a substantial proportion of Africa’s population aged under 25, and further demographic changes in that direction anticipated, creating good quality cold-chain related jobs that range from the technicians installing and maintaining refrigeration equipment, and engineers developing novel in-country focussed technologies, to innovative entrepreneurs building compelling food brands and logistics workers implementing new supply-chain opportunities, will be a welcome contribution to extending the continent’s employment opportunities.
However, despite the clear, indisputable need, for cold-chain solutions in the Global South, they are not being financed and implemented at the required scale or speed, nor in a holistic and inclusive manner. 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? Tackling these difficult questions is at the core of A Cool World.
Accelerating the Global South’s uptake of sustainable cold-chains
Rapidly delivering cold-chains at scale for all who need them in the Global South faces many barriers to progress, particularly in the context of the specific multi-faceted challenges to the deployment of such solutions in rural communities. 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 with cold-chains must conceive of, and deliver, radical, practical, truly transformative solutions to meet cooling needs sustainably and inclusively. We must take 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.
To drive our collective collaboration forward to achieving these outcomes, CCN’s two-day workshops-based international conference at Birmingham University will catalyse collaborative thinking on how, as a community, we can provide holistic, sustainable, affordable, and resilient 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.
In the UK, following last year’s publication of CCN’s ground-breaking "The Hot Reality: Living in a +50°C World – Cooling as critical infrastructure to survive and thrive" report, which lead the way in advocating for cooling to be considered critical national infrastructure (CNI), cold-chains have become widely recognised as CNI. The next step is to reinforce this vital message with governments, industry and academia in the Global South, where shifting demographics, increasing affluence, growing cooling demand and more frequent climate change impacts make it even more significant to embrace. A Cool World is an opportunity to help deepen our understanding and thinking on the importance of cold-chains as CNI in a Global South context, its relationship with the future food security, health and economic well-being of the Global North, and to start translating words into practical, meaningful actions on the ground.
A Cool World brings together cold-chain 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 such 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 on October 28th and 29th.