Air conditioning today consumes more electricity than the entire African continent. And global demand for cooling will triple by 2050, driven by intensifying heat and by the billions of inhabitants of emerging countries finally accessing a comfort long reserved for the wealthy. This is not an abstract threat: it is a mechanism already set in motion, whose outcome depends almost entirely on political choices that can still be made.

The good news, rarely stated clearly, is that technologies to escape this mechanism exist. They are not in futuristic laboratories. Some are on store shelves. Others already equip entire neighborhoods in Copenhagen, Singapore, or Lyon. What is missing is not invention — it is deployment.

The Essential Points

  • The average efficiency of air conditioners sold worldwide is less than half of what is technically available on the market: generalizing the minimum performance standards already in force in the United States and Europe would reduce global cooling demand by 45% (IEA, The Future of Cooling).
  • Three complementary families of technologies — passive radiative cooling, refrigerants with very low global warming potential, urban cooling networks coupled with renewables — have achieved or are approaching commercial viability.
  • Approximately 85% of future cooling demand is concentrated in emerging countries where energy efficiency standards are absent or poorly enforced, and where purchase price takes priority over total operating cost.
  • COP28 produced the first collective commitment on sustainable cooling, including 63 countries. Regulatory translation remains highly uneven.

Let us start with a figure that deserves careful attention. According to the IEA, if the average efficiency of air conditioners sold worldwide simply reached that of the best devices currently available in stores — not prototypes, not future technologies — global electricity demand for cooling would drop by 45%. Not in 2050 after decades of research. Now, with devices that exist.

This figure says something important about the nature of the problem. It is not a technological frontier to cross. It is a gap between what is available and what is purchased — a gap maintained by insufficient policies, poorly organized markets, and perverse incentives.

Air Conditioning Is a Self-Reinforcing Machine

To understand why this gap persists, we must understand how the cooling market works. An air conditioner is purchased once, paid for in electricity over ten to fifteen years. The buyer — often a renter, often in a country where electricity is subsidized — looks at the price at checkout, not the cumulative bill over ten years. The manufacturer offering an efficient device but 30% more expensive loses to his competitor. The regulator who does not set an efficiency floor lets the market converge downward.

The result is documented. The 3.6 billion air conditioning units in service worldwide in 2022 consume, according to the IEA, approximately 2,000 terawatt-hours per year — more than the total electricity consumption of Africa. And of the approximately two billion additional units expected by 2050, a majority will be sold in countries where no minimum efficiency standard exists.

This is where the circle becomes vicious. The hotter it gets, the more we air condition. The more we air condition with inefficient devices, the more energy we burn, and the more emissions contribute to warming. The devices themselves emit, during operation, refrigerant fluids whose global warming potential sometimes exceeds that of CO₂ by a thousand times. The IEA estimates that without a change in trajectory, the cooling sector alone could represent by 2050 a non-negligible share of global emissions remaining compatible with 1.5°C.

Minimum Efficiency Standards: The Least Glamorous and Most Effective Tool

The United States imposed its first minimum standards on air conditioners in 1987. Europe followed with the energy label and its progressive revisions. The result is unambiguous: between 1990 and 2020, the average consumption of an American air conditioner more than halved, while indoor temperatures reached the same comfort levels. Efficiency doubled, the bill dropped, the market absorbed the constraint.

This is not a niche policy. It is one of the best-documented examples of regulation that improves consumer welfare, industrial competitiveness, and climate objectives simultaneously. Manufacturers who had opposed the standards eventually gained a competitive export advantage by mastering technologies their competitors in non-regulated markets had no need to develop.

The problem is that this lesson has not spread. India, which will become the world’s largest air conditioning market by 2030 according to several projections, has standards, but their level remains below European benchmarks and their application is variable. Indonesia, the Philippines, Nigeria, Egypt — countries with high demographic growth and high thermal exposure — have fragile or non-existent regulatory frameworks. This is precisely where most of future demand will be decided.

COP28 in Dubai, in December 2023, marked a first: 63 countries signed the “Global Cooling Pledge,” committing to reduce emissions from cooling by 68% by 2050 and to promote minimum efficiency standards. This is a real political signal. But a collective commitment produces a national standard only if governments translate it into regulatory text, which few have done to date.

Three Technologies That Change What Is Possible

Beyond standards — which remain the most powerful tool in the short term — a set of emerging technologies reshapes what “cooling” can mean.

Passive radiative cooling is probably the most surprising. The principle is physical: certain materials can radiate heat directly to space, through the atmosphere, at a wavelength where it is transparent. In practical terms, this means that a surface covered with these materials can stay cooler than the ambient air, even in full sun, without consuming electricity. Researchers at Stanford University demonstrated surface temperatures 5°C lower than outside air in sunny conditions. Startups — notably SkyCool Systems in the United States — are commercializing radiative panels coupled to existing cooling systems to reduce their consumption by 20 to 40%.

The potential is enormous, particularly for commercial buildings and refrigerated warehouses in high-sunlight countries. The current limitation is the cost of large-scale deployment and the complexity of integration with existing buildings. Several pilot projects are underway in India, Saudi Arabia, and Spain. The technology is not yet a mass-market solution, but it is no longer a laboratory object either.

Next-generation refrigerants tackle a different problem: leaks of refrigerant fluids from operating devices. The most common hydrofluorocarbon, R-410A, has a global warming potential 2,088 times that of CO₂. The Kigali Protocol, adopted in 2016 and ratified by 155 countries, imposes a progressive reduction of these substances. Alternatives exist: propane (R-290), with a global warming potential of 3, already equips domestic refrigerators in Europe and is beginning to gain ground in air conditioners in China, Germany, and Thailand. Fourth-generation synthetic refrigerants (HFOs) offer performance comparable to current fluids with a 99% reduced climate impact.

The challenge is threefold: training technicians in new safety procedures (propane is flammable), adapting supply chains, and accelerating the transition pace in countries where the Kigali Protocol faces resistance from local industries still producing old fluids.

Urban cooling networks represent a systemic rather than technological approach. Rather than multiplying thousands of individual air conditioners in a neighborhood, a cooling network centralizes cold production in a shared facility, then distributes chilled water through underground pipes. The efficiency gain is considerable: pooling allows for larger and more efficient machines, thermal storage allows cold to be produced at night (when electricity is cheaper and the network less strained), and coupling with residual heat sources or renewables becomes possible at a scale an individual air conditioner cannot reach.

Paris, Copenhagen, Stockholm, and Singapore have operational urban cooling networks that have been running for several years. In Paris, the Climespace network serves the Opéra Garnier, the Louvre, and several hospitals with an efficiency two to three times higher than comparable individual air conditioners. The business model, which requires heavy infrastructure investments and sufficient urban density, is particularly suited to high-density Asian and African cities undergoing rapid urbanization. The World Bank and several climate funds are beginning to finance such projects in Vietnam, Ethiopia, and Colombia.

The challenge of industrial deployment in emerging countries echoes other dynamics observed in the energy transition. Like Indian solar, the question is not only the availability of technology, but the articulation between local industrial policy, international financing, and regulation that makes deployment economically viable.

Why Emerging Markets Are Both the Problem and the Solution

Eighty-five percent of future cooling demand will come from emerging countries. This geographic concentration is both the primary risk and the clearest opportunity.

The risk is well known: if India, Indonesia, and sub-Saharan African countries equip themselves massively with inefficient devices using high global warming potential refrigerants, the 1.5°C trajectory becomes mathematically untenable. Every million air conditioners sold without efficiency standards today commits an infrastructure of consumption for fifteen years.

The opportunity lies in a phenomenon economists call “leapfrogging”: countries that equip themselves late can skip entire technological generations. Some African countries massively adopted mobile phones without ever installing fixed lines. The same leap is possible for cooling: equip directly with the best technologies available, avoiding the detour through inefficient devices that Europe and the United States took decades to replace.

But this leap does not happen spontaneously. It requires three conditions rarely met: clear regulatory standards, access to financing for efficient devices (whose initial cost is higher), and a local industry capable of producing or assembling compliant equipment. India has a significant air conditioning manufacturing industry but one still oriented toward low-end segments. China, the world’s leading producer, masters both ends of the spectrum and can produce highly efficient devices as well as very cheap ones.

This is where commercial and climate policy converge. Europe has introduced carbon border adjustment mechanisms for certain industrial products. Applying energy efficiency standards to the import of cooling equipment would be consistent with this logic and constitute a powerful lever to guide global production.

Climate Finance as the Missing Variable

Discussions on sustainable cooling often stumble on the same obstacle: the cost differential. An efficient air conditioner costs on average 20 to 30% more than a standard device with comparable performance. For a middle-class household in Mumbai or Accra, this is a real barrier. The calculation over ten years clearly favors the efficient device — the cumulative electricity bill more than compensates for the initial difference — but this calculation assumes access to credit and a certain stability in energy prices that many households lack.

Financial instruments exist to bridge this gap. Subsidized green loan mechanisms, programs to exchange old devices for efficient models (already tested in Mexico, Morocco, and Thailand), or energy performance contracts allow financing the difference in initial cost over the device’s lifetime. UNEP, the United Nations Environment Programme, has coordinated since 2021 the “Chilling Prospects Initiative” which seeks to accelerate access to these instruments in countries with strong potential for demand growth.

These mechanisms work when carefully designed. The challenge is scale: moving from pilot programs touching tens of thousands of households to national policies covering markets of several million units per year. The difficulty in connecting renewable capacity to the grid reminds us that the energy transition often stumbles on infrastructure and institutional coordination problems far more than technological gaps — and cooling is no exception.

What Is at Stake in the Coming Years

The next revision of the Kigali Protocol is scheduled for 2028. Negotiations on the ambition levels of efficiency standards within the framework of the “Global Cooling Pledge” are ongoing in several signatory countries. The IEA published in July 2025 an updated commentary emphasizing that the cooling sector remains one of the least covered by national energy policies, despite its growing weight in global electricity consumption.

Two decisions made in the next five years will be decisive. The first is the adoption of minimum efficiency standards in major emerging markets — India, Indonesia, Nigeria — before the installed base becomes too massive to be quickly renewed. The second is the structure of climate finance allocated to cooling within the framework of the next cycle of COP and the Green Climate Fund.

These decisions are not technical. They are political. The gap between what is available and what is deployed does not exist because engineers failed. It exists because standards were avoided, financing deferred, and ambitions revised downward under pressure from industries that prefer to sell cheap devices with high turnover.

The question for governments of emerging countries is not whether sober cooling is technically possible. It is. The question is whether access to efficient air conditioning will be treated as a public good to be organized — in the same way as drinking water or electricity — or left to a market that, without constraint, will systematically choose the option cheapest in the short term and most expensive over time.

Sources

  1. International Energy Agency — “Staying cool without overheating the energy system” (July 2025): https://www.iea.org/commentaries/staying-cool-without-overheating-the-energy-system
  2. International Energy Agency — The Future of Cooling (2018): report available on iea.org
  3. International Energy Agency — Energy Efficiency 2024: report available on iea.org
  4. UNEP — Chilling Prospects Initiative: data on access to sustainable cooling, unep.org
  5. Kigali Protocol on Hydrofluorocarbons (2016) — Ozone Secretariat, United Nations
  6. SkyCool Systems — technical publications on passive radiative cooling: skycoolsystems.com
  7. COP28 Global Cooling Pledge (December 2023) — text available on cop28.com