Hi everyone, welcome to the podcast from the Future of Cooling Programme of Oxford Martin School.
I'm a fellow at the Oxford Martin School. My name is Nicole Miranda.
I'm looking into the socio technical aspects of sustainable cooling.
We are researching active and passive technologies and how more demand will come on.
And as global warming heats up, the planet interest in expanding the solution space from our conventional air
conditioners to other ways of cooling from shading to ponds and roofs to radiator panels,
etc. even having ice cream. We have two in today's theory.
Professor Radhika Khosla, who is the principal investigator of the Future of Cooling Programme.
She is a professor at the Smith School of Enterprise and Environment and at of School of Geography,
and she is the research director of the Oxford India Centre for Sustainable Development.
She has extensive experience energy, climate change and development and policy.
Apart from the future of Cooling team,
she has also led the ClimateWorks Foundation project on climate friendly and socioeconomically productive core change.
Radhika is a contributing author to the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change,
IPCC and the United Nations Environmental Programme.
The Net Emission Gaps Report.
Her other academic affiliations are with MIT and the University of Pennsylvania and the U.S. and the Centre of Policy Research in India.
She has been a staff scientist at the Natural Resources Defence Council in New York,
where she helped set up the organisation's work on clean energy and climate change in
India and led research and implementation on building energy policies in Indian states.
She serves on government policy committees and boards of journals and book presses.
Welcome, Radhika. Thank you so much, Nicole.
So first of all, we'd like to know more about your experience on cooling.
On the personal side, what is your connexion to cooling and how?
Why did you decide to research this topic? It's actually you know, it's kind of an easy answer.
It's because I spend too much time in cases that were too hot.
And but what was striking for me has been that, you know, so many parts of the world are, you know, beset with such extreme heat.
And yet in many other parts of the world, including in the U.K. and for us here in Oxford,
we don't think about that as something that, you know, that one has to grapple with on an everyday basis.
And we don't fully appreciate, as a result the energy implications,
but also like the everyday lifestyle implications and the challenges that come from living with extreme heat.
So I think as we move towards a world where, you know, there's increased frequency and intensity of heatwaves,
this just seems like a really urgent issue for us to examine.
Absolutely. And talking about the big issues and challenging Kurt, let's let's dive into those questions.
We've seen figures from the IEA, the Energy International Energy Agency,
saying that in the next 30 years, ten air conditioners will be sold every second.
What consequences will that have? Is that a bad thing?
Could be a climate. Yeah. I mean, it's it's a shocking number, right?
Ten new air conditioners, an equivalent of ten new air conditioners every second for the next 30 years.
It's both a good and a bad thing. It's a good thing because it means that a lot more people are going to have access to technologies that
will keep them cool and that will be providing them with a form of tomo comfort that is necessary for,
you know, for, for wellbeing. It's a bad thing because of two main reasons.
One, it is. Air conditioners are increasingly environmentally damaging in the current form with which they are operating,
both because they use mainly energy intensive and fossil fuel based, often in most countries, electricity.
But the magnitude of the electricity was is extremely high.
What's worse is that air conditioners also have refrigerant gases that, again, are greenhouse gases.
And so as a result, you have the use of air conditioners leading to the release of more greenhouse gases.
That leads to a further release window for the warming of the planet and the need for more air conditioning.
So there's this negative feedback loop that is very problematic.
The second reason why, you know, it's this IEA statistic is alarming is that in spite of the really large increase,
other studies tell us that the gap of access to air conditioners is anywhere between 2 to 4 billion people in 2050,
which means that even though, you know, there is such a large exponential rise in air conditioning that is impending.
2 to 4 billion people will not have access to this technology.
And as a result, for them, cooling and the provision of thermal comfort for well-being is going to continue to remain a challenge.
Absolutely. Yeah. And on air conditioning, do you see them as part of the solution or are they on their way out?
Yeah, well, I think that, you know, we don't really have a mainstream technology that can replace air conditioners at the moment.
So I do think that we are locked into compression air conditioning, which is not great because there are many alternatives.
And these alternatives have often existed for a long time in the form of passive cooling techniques through shading,
ventilation, heat modulation, dissipation, or through vernacular architecture,
which uses local ways and resources of putting together and assembling buildings and inhabited spaces,
but also through other mechanisms like lifestyles that and culture that are cooling that allow us to stay cool.
Now, all of these are probably and they are they are not going to be enough when we're
looking at extremely high temperatures in the forties and even fifties now.
But it is much more the case of using a portfolio of options that focus on passive passive approaches
first and then that and therefore really reduce the demand for air conditioning that I see as as,
you know, as a way forward.
And then, of course, the technology itself also has large scope to get a lot more efficient, to use much better refrigerants,
and then to have a grid that supplies that energy to these air conditioners that is decarbonised.
Right. So, yeah, we can see that that the grid actually is going to be really affected by all of these air conditioners.
Mm hmm. Yeah, they're growing again.
You mentioned previously about the the s gases and how they are a big challenge and that because they're used in in this locked technology.
What why are they such a big challenge and in the world of greenhouse gases and emissions?
So refrigerant gases that are used in the vehicle compression technology that is, you know,
the air conditioner in in in most homes are short lived gases and they are greenhouse gases and they have very high global warming potential,
which means that when these gases are released into the atmosphere,
which often happens during operations of the air conditioner caused maybe by leakage or at the end of life of an air conditioner,
you know, at the disposal stage, these gases, I have a global warming potential that is tens of thousands of times higher than that of CO2,
and therefore can cause a very sharp increase in warming in the in the near term.
So they have lifespans of about, you know, less than 20 years.
But within that time frame, they have the ability to cause a very high rate of warming and therefore, ah, compound the,
the impact of, you know, that the negative impact that air conditioning has, particularly on climate change.
Thanks, Radhika. Apart from the energy and emission challenges of air conditioners and their
refrigerants in the programme we have recently published in Nature Sustainability,
The Relationship of Cooling and the Sustainable Development Goals.
Could you give us some examples of the links between COOLING and the SDGs?
It was very fun because it it uncovered all of these interesting things about the relationship between cooling and sustainable development.
One interesting fact was that the word cool cooling called refrigerator freeze, none of these feature in any of the 17 goals or the 169 targets.
And yet, you know, if we look at the relationship between the provision of cooling and achieving the goals,
we actually find evidence of cooling being related to the achievement of each of the different 17 Sustainable Development Goals.
So for instance, you know, some of the most obvious ones are climate action,
because we know that cooling drives large increases in greenhouse gas emissions and because of gases that are a by-product of refrigeration.
Another one is affordable and clean energy.
So sustainable development goal number seven. And we know that active space cooling technologies have very large electricity demand.
Another example of how cooling is tied to a different kind of goal is that of quality education and studies show us how cognitive facilities are.
Cognitive faculties are impaired by extreme temperatures, and heat has a negative impact on productivity and learning outcomes,
which can be mitigated by another sustainable development.
Goal is goal number three on good health and well-being. And here, cooling is once again central.
It reduces the health burden of severe exposure to heat, especially with the climate change impacts of of rising temperatures.
And we know more recently that cooling is essential for vaccine delivery.
And so, again, you know, the relationship between cooling and good health and well-being is is very important.
And the last example is the sustainable development goal of zero hunger.
And we know, again, that cooling plays a really important role in enabling food production and delivery via the cold chain,
as well as cooling techniques that support food production in in greenhouses.
Absolutely.
And on that vaccine, which is definitely a theme that we have been struggling at and globally, cooling has a really important part to play.
Thanks for that, Radhika. So regarding the team at the future cooling programme, how are we organised to tackle the big challenge of cooling?
So the team is organised around different dimensions of cooling, which we consider to be a socio technical system.
You know, there's a really good sort of workstream around technologies and the role that
both active and passive cooling technologies can play in this future trajectory.
And as most of you know, most of this is in engineering.
There's also the work workstream without understanding cooling cultures, lifestyles.
And that is, you know, we have geographers who are addressing this question and we have a whole workstream on understanding the
relationship between extreme heat and health and particularly the impact of morbidity and extreme heat.
So not just mortality, but actually examining the different ways in which heat affects human health.
And that is with our colleagues in the Department of Public Health.
And then also there's a stream of work around understanding the global production network of cooling.
So, you know, where are cooling technologies mainly made?
Where do they end up? What is the sort of life cycle of that larger industrial process?
And where can value be gained and lost within it?
So again, sort of colleagues, mainly more economic geographies, I'd say are are looking at that question.
So as you can see, it's, you know, it moves from very technical to very social.
But the key part is that, you know, we're always in conversation with each other,
which makes it a very a very sort of dramatic and systems way of looking at this issue.
Great. Thank you. And about the team, it's very interdisciplinary.
It's very exciting to be part of it myself as well.
And I wanted to gather from you, what do you consider are the main impacts and outputs that we've had so far as a team?
Yeah, I mean, I think what we can say credibly is that, you know, we are putting out.
In a way, building the field around cooling to the extent that the whether these are publications
in sort of very quantitative technological terms or very sort of qualitative.
What we are doing is really helping understand what comprises the cooling system and how its trajectory can be shaped.
And I think that's reflected in our you know, in our nature sustainability publication.
And the fact that it was on the cover is something we're all so pleased about,
but also in the way that we are able to then inform more of the public discourse around cooling,
whether it is by being, you know, in the media or in on on television at times and also sort of informing public policy.
So, you know, we've had various interactions with policymakers who are thinking through these questions.
And our ability to be able to share the work that we're doing with them is helpful in in informing impact.
Hold. Could you give us a couple examples of how our flagship framework could be applied by a person?
Yeah. So the framework, you know, has it has two or three key components.
One is that it considers cooling at different stages.
So it doesn't think of cooling as sort of a one as a one piece item actually divides it up into the raw materials that comprise it.
The assemblage of these materials that that sort of things are put together,
the activities around which this cooling technology is active or passive are used,
and then the end of life of that particular form of providing cooling.
And then what it argues for is to say that there are five different levers of change that act on each of these four different stages of cooling.
And those five levers of change are technologies, governance and policy, human behaviour and lifestyles, business models,
and then infrastructure itself, because we know that infrastructure actually shapes the solution of space.
And then you can look at the different intersections between these five levers and the four stages of cooling.
And what you have is a number of different points of intervention points where we
can engage with and find ways to actually change the system towards sustainability.
So an example could be see the policy lever acting on the end of life stage,
where regulations around end of life disposal of cooling equipments are put in place and actually implemented.
Because we know that at this point the circular economy of cooling is is quite unexamined
and there is a lot of leakage and disposal that that takes place within the system,
including illegal trading, often of refrigerant gases.
So moving on to the future of cloning, which is not only the name of our programme,
but also our vision that we want to share for a more tactical, immediate future project.
Could you tell perhaps cooling investors that are listening to this podcast,
what are the next three big things that need researching and financing within cooling?
Yeah, it's a great question. So I'd say that one of the first things is for us to think about cooling technologies, how we measure them, how we,
you know, sort of think about standardising technologies in a way where pooling is considered as more than just temperature.
So moving beyond temperature as the exclusive way in which to measure cooling,
but rather to consider all different comfort variables, whether that is humidity, radiant temperature,
air velocity, and therefore, you know,
sort of examining products that are both energy intensive in cooling and otherwise as a function of more than just temperature.
The second thing I'd say is that, you know,
really investing in finding ways to scale passive cooling technologies is really important because like we were talking about before,
where, you know, air conditioning is extremely energy intensive, it's environmentally damaging and it is often just unaffordable.
So while it is really important for being able to provide some comfort in regions of extreme heat, it isn't going to be enough to solve everyone.
And therefore what we need is to have at scale other forms of cooling that are not as energy intensive.
And that is a whole sort of literature and history of passive cooling technologies that allow temperatures,
you know, extremes to be reduced and the need for mechanical cooling to be reduced.
And therefore investing in passive cooling technologies of scale would be, you know, a second a second point.
And then the third thing I'd say is that, you know, extreme heat is here to stay.
And it's really important that societies, vulnerable communities and individuals all are equipped with a way of learning to live with it.
So understanding the implications of that at the global level is also quite important because cities are much warmer than their surroundings already.
So for instance, some of the work that we're doing around this is to examine the number of cooling degree
days and how those are going to change and increase as global temperatures rise.
But essentially understanding where the hotspots of extreme heat are going to be and then thinking through the practical ways and means by which,
you know, one can learn to live with that kind of extreme heat in a manner that is not damaging to the well-being,
the lives and livelihoods of the people who are inhabiting these regions.
And I'd say all of this ties in also with the goal of the programme, which is not just to understand the future of cooling, but also helps shape it.
All right, fantastic. Thank you, Radhika. So in a nutshell, we need to consider that cooling is more than just temperature.
We need to scan that passive technologies and we need to also learn to live with extreme heat.
What is what would you see as a more strategic point of view?
Like if we achieve cooling in a sustainable way, how would you see yourself walking through a hot city that has a sustainable cooling strategy?
What would it look? How would it look different than your walk than today?
Yeah, well, I can think of, you know, some simple things.
One is the use of a lot more smart surfaces.
So a smart surface, as we consider it, is one that is, you know, that has high reflectivity.
So it doesn't really absorb that much heat and it can also have evaporative cooling as part of it.
So sort of, you know, green surfaces. So I think, you know, a sustainable cooling based walk would involve being on smart surfaces,
having shading overhead above pedestrian areas, and then also just being close to both water and green bodies.
So ensuring that, you know, there is enough of all of that to be able to provide some respite from the heat.
Absolutely. Yes. And we already see that in certain neighbourhoods with lots of cement.
For example, urban heat island gets exasperated them.
Yeah. Super. Thanks for taking us through a walk through a sustainable cookie, safe city of the future.
So apart from passive and active measures, what that will be able to see in our cities are.
Do you think that people's mentality should change towards good coding?
Yeah, absolutely. I think, you know, technologies don't operate in isolation.
It's about the choices we make about how to use a technology that really changes.
And it's either mind and is of, you know, a factor contributing to climate change.
And so lifestyles have a huge role to play. I mean, we know lifestyle emissions are almost two thirds of all emissions.
So with regards to cooling, it's really important to be able to be aware of how damaging using the air conditioner is.
I think delinking some of the more kind of early ways in which air conditioning came about,
where the the use of an air conditioner was tied to ideas of modernism and progress and status.
I think delinking that and sort of seeing it for its environmental reality is, you know, is helpful.
It's very difficult to do, particularly in in sort of, you know, emerging hot parts of the world, but also, you know,
constantly making that choice about using passive non mechanical cooling based forms
first before switching to an energy intensive air conditioning mode can be really,
really useful sometimes it's very simple.
It's just about having ventilation and, you know, sort of covering one's sort of body so that you don't get burnt.
But and having said all of this changes depending on where one is and how hot it is.
But there is always the choice to be able to use passive forced.
Well, thank you. Radicalise is certainly a challenging, yet necessary vision we need to achieve to decarbonise cooling.
We want to thank you for explaining the challenges and solutions in the sector and presenting our Oxford Martin School team to the world.
Through this podcast, we've reached the end of our podcast, but looking forward to discussing other issues related to cooling through these channels.
Please subscribe to our Future of Cooling newsletter and on our website and thanks again Radhika and to you listeners.
Bye bye.