SAN FRANCISCO – July 19, 2022 – Clean Cooling Collaborative, the leading global philanthropic program focused on curbing greenhouse gas emissions from cooling, today announced a $25 million grant from the IKEA Foundation over the next four years to advance solutions for efficient, climate-friendly cooling for all.

The IKEA Foundation joins the Clean Cooling Collaborative to support its work to shift governments, industries, and consumers towards using efficient, climate-friendly cooling technologies, help reduce greenhouse gas emissions in line with the Paris Agreement and improve billions of lives.

“Climate change is fueling record-setting heat waves around the globe, which put the lives and livelihoods of over 1.2 billion people at risk due to a lack of access to cooling,” said Edgar van de Brug, programme manager Climate Action, at IKEA Foundation. “We’re proud to join the Clean Cooling Collaborative and support their ambitious plan to promote efficient, climate-friendly cooling solutions to reduce emissions and create a healthy planet for people worldwide.”

Cooling appliances like air conditioners and refrigerators were designed to protect people, food, and medicine from heat. However, the increased use of these technologies adds greenhouse gas emissions through the energy used to operate them and by refrigerants leaking fluorinated gases into the atmosphere. Today, cooling represents more than seven percent of global annual greenhouse gas emissions. It is poised to double by 2050 unless there are interventions to improve a full range of cooling solutions.

“We believe cooling should be a human right, and the sector must be on a more sustainable and accessible path as demand for air conditioning explodes worldwide,” said Noah Horowitz, director of the Clean Cooling Collaborative. “We welcome the IKEA Foundation to the Clean Cooling Collaborative. Their generous support will help supercharge our collective efforts to boost appliance efficiency and the use of climate-friendly refrigerants, expand global access to more sustainable cooling, and use these solutions to reduce harmful greenhouse gas emissions for decades to come.”

The Clean Cooling Collaborative is the largest philanthropic program working to transform the cooling sector. The program has launched a new set of strategies that put the clean cooling community on a path to avoid 100 gigatons of CO2e emissions globally by 2050.

The Collaborative’s efforts will be centered on: reducing the need for mechanical cooling through improved building design and urban planning; optimizing mechanical cooling technologies and their use to be more efficient, climate-friendly and grid-friendly; and increasing access to efficient, climate-friendly cooling for people at risk from the threats of extreme heat.

The program will target most of its grantmaking on the regions projected to be responsible for 75 percent of all global cooling-related emissions over the next 30 years: India, China, Southeast Asia, and the United States.

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About the Clean Cooling Collaborative

The Clean Cooling Collaborative is making efficient, climate-friendly cooling a reality for all. A philanthropic initiative of ClimateWorks Foundation launched in 2017 as the Kigali Cooling Efficiency Program (K-CEP), the Clean Cooling Collaborative is making cooling more sustainable and accessible.

About the IKEA Foundation

The IKEA Foundation is a strategic philanthropy that focuses its grant making efforts on tackling the two biggest threats to children’s futures: poverty and climate change. It currently grants more than €200 million per year to help improve family incomes and quality of life while protecting the planet from climate change. Since 2009, the IKEA Foundation has granted more than €1.5 billion to create a better future for children and their families.

In 2021 the Foundation decided to make an additional €1 billion available over the next five years to accelerate the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions.

Learn more at: www.ikeafoundation.org.

Media Contacts:

Clean Cooling Collaborative: Jennifer Rigney, jennifer.rigney@climateworks.org

IKEA Foundation: Lotika Mehta, Lotika.mehta@ikeafoundation.org