Sustainable cooling experts met in Birmingham (UK) this week for a global summit organised by the Centre for Sustainable Cooling (CSC).
At the summit, the University of Birmingham and the Indian State of Haryana signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to develop a Haryana Centre of Excellence on crop post-harvest management and sustainable cold chain.
The agreement builds on the Africa Centre of Excellence for Sustainable Cooling and Cold-chain (ACES) developed with the Government of Rwanda and UN Environment Programme at the University of Rwanda.
The Haryana Centre of Excellence will conduct state-of-the-art applied research and provide capacity building and training, an innovation and business hub and technology testing/demonstration centre. It will connect experts, investors, agri-food business, farmer cooperatives, and energy or logistics providers to deliver sustainable cooling.
It also follows an MoU signed earlier this year with the Indian State of Telangana for a Telangana Centre of Excellence. The UK and UN Environment technical assistance programme is funded by DEFRA.
Summit organisers will publish a report with recommendations that will be pursued in ACES and the Haryana Centre later this year.
Opening the Summit, Rwandan High Commissioner, Johnston Busingye, said turning food loss and waste into nutritionally available food is critical for Africa’s sustainable development as well as building critical food reserves that are used to feed people in times of shocks.
“Compounded impacts from a global pandemic, growing pressures from the climate crisis, high energy prices, and protracted conflicts have disrupted production and supply chains and dramatically increased global food insecurity, especially for the most vulnerable countries,” he said.
Approximately 60 per cent of food should be refrigerated at some point in the food supply chain. Lack of effective refrigeration results in the loss of 526 million tonnes of food produced (12 per cent of the global total) with developing countries refrigerating less than 20 per cent of their production.
These food losses result in an estimated 1 gigaton of CO2-eq emissions each year globally, in addition to wasting agricultural inputs such as land, fertilizers, water and energy.
Equally, 25 per cent of vaccines reach their destination with degraded efficacy mainly due to failures within the cold-chains; 20 per cent of temperature-sensitive pharmaceutical products are damaged due to broken cold-chains.
Minister of Agriculture & Farmers’ Welfare for the government.of Haryana, Jai Parkash Dalal, said the UK-Haryana Centre for Post-harvest & Cold Chain will be a big leap towards developing and demonstrating post-harvest technologies that will enhance the shelf life of perishable produce.
Conventional cooling technologies are highly polluting due to climate impact of refrigerants (HFCs) and indirect emissions from energy use. They account for seven per cent of all global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, and these emissions could double by 2030, and triple by 2100.
Toby Peters, CSC ddrector and Professor of Cold Economy at the University of Birmingham and Heriot-Watt University, said now is the time to create globally connected cold chains.
“Temperature-controlled supply chains networks are complex, requiring coordination across multiple stakeholders countries and continents. We need to understand the interplay with renewable energy and climate friendly refrigerants,” he said.
“We must also understand the impact and opportunities of radical new innovations - refrigeration cycles, Drones, Blockchain and Internet-of-Things (IoT) - as well as the food innovations such as alternative proteins, vertical farming which will dramatically change how we produce, distribute and consume food.”