UN Environment fights to cut cooling and heating emissions

Cooling and heating are—for those lucky enough to have them—a lifesaver, keeping children healthy, vaccines stable, food fresh, energy supplies stable, economies productive and environments clean.

But there is a cruel irony at play. Cooling and heating systems consume over 50 percent of building energy and run largely on fossil fuels—at a level of 84 percent in the European Union, for example. Consequently, they are pushing our planet’s temperature up to dangerous levels.

We can expect more greenhouse gas emissions from the sector as the planet warms and middle classes expand in developing economies. We need this growth to provide equitable access to the 1.1 billion people who face imminent threats from a lack of cooling.

With energy consumption in the refrigeration, air conditioning and heat pump sectors expected to surge 33 times by 2100, we need to build up renewable energy and energy efficiency to avoid runaway climate change. This is possible, as the work of UN Environment’s District Energy in Cities Initiative is showing in Bosnia and Herzegovina, India and the 14 other countries where it works.

In Bosnia and Herzegovina’s second-largest city, Banja Luka, district energy—a network of underground pipes that carry hot or cold water to multiple buildings—keeps around 20,000 residents warm when winter bites hard. But the 35-year-old system has relied on fuel oil to power its creaky and inefficient boilers. The Initiative teamed up with the city, the UN Environment-hosted Climate Technology Centre and Network and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, to change this.

Through the partnership, the city attracted US$22 million in investment for a district heating network that runs on renewable energy. The 49-megawatt system, which uses locally sourced biomass, came online in March 2018. This increased the share of renewables by 75 percent, reducing CO2 emissions by 91 percent and saving up to US$1 million annually in reduced fuel costs.

UN Environment is also backing another process to make the cooling industry more climate-friendly: the Kigali Amendment to the Montreal Protocol. This legally binding expansion to the treaty that protects our ozone layer can avoid up to 0.4°C of global warming this century by reducing the use of powerful climate-warming refrigerants known as hydrofluorocarbons by 80 percent.

Ultimately, cooling and heating present huge opportunities to minimize greenhouse gas emissions. With pledges under the Paris Agreement only taking the world one-third of the way towards the cuts needed to limit climate change to 2°C, we have to seize them.

Original source: UN Environment
Published on 07 March 2019