A Framework for Tracking Cooling Investment

This knowledge brief proposes a new approach to identify and track cooling transactions, a first step toward understanding current finance commitments and acting on growing global needs for sustainable cooling solutions. 

Global cooling needs are significant and expected to continue growing rapidly, especially in high-impact countries (HICs). This increasing demand is likely to drive spikes in energy use and GHG emissions and will require large volumes of finance for low-carbon, climate-resilient cooling solutions. However, current cooling finance datasets do not include investment in several important types of cooling solutions and lack project-level information, preventing governments, development banks, and private investors from assembling comprehensive cooling transaction databases. Without the ability to track financial commitments to cooling projects over time, these actors will be unable to evaluate how actual cooling investment patterns compare to projected needs across sectors and geographies, limiting public and private institutions’ ability to deploy capital where it is needed most. 

The long-term goal is universal adoption of the Framework among financial institutions and donor governments, enabling the tracking of finance flows and informing smart, targeted investment strategies that meet growing sustainable cooling needs around the world. 

See also: Energizing Finance series