Global Cooling Watch 2025: The free degrees: How sustainable, passive first-cooling can save lives, money and food

The second edition of UNEP’s Global Cooling Watch Report takes a deep dive into one of the decade’s most urgent challenges: surging heat, soaring cooling demand, and stark inequalities in access. Building on the 2023 edition’s analysis of global sustainable cooling trends, the report provides the scientific foundation for the Global Cooling Pledge and charts pathways toward near-zero emissions from cooling.

The report was launched at COP30 in Belém, Brazil, and finds that cooling demand could more than triple by 2050 under business as usual, driven by increases in population and wealth, more extreme heat events and low-income households increasingly gaining access to more polluting and inefficient cooling. This would almost double cooling-related greenhouse gas emissions over 2022 levels – pushing cooling emissions to an estimated 7.2 billion tons of CO₂  by 2050 – despite efforts to improve energy efficiency, phase down climate-warming refrigerants and overwhelm power grids during peak load. It also suggests adopting a ‘Sustainable Cooling Pathway’, which could reduce emissions to 64 per cent - 2.6 billion tons of CO₂ - below the levels expected in 2050. When combined with rapid decarbonization of the global power sector, residual cooling emissions could fall to 97 per cent below business-as-usual levels.