Cooling Is Essential Infrastructure

Why Asian cities need to treat thermal comfort as a public system, not merely a consumer appliance market

Air conditioning is usually discussed as a consumer choice or an energy problem. In a hotter Asia, that framing is becoming too narrow. Cooling increasingly determines whether people can work, sleep, learn, store food, receive healthcare and survive extreme heat. That makes it infrastructure.

The difficulty is that cooling is distributed across many systems. Buildings determine indoor temperatures. Electricity networks determine whether mechanical cooling is reliable. Public space determines how much heat people absorb outside. Cold chains affect food and medicine. Labour rules determine when people are exposed. Household income determines who can purchase cooling at all. No single institution owns the outcome.

India illustrates the scale of the challenge. The World Bank has argued that a greener cooling pathway could create an investment opportunity of around US$1.6 trillion by 2040. Yet the most important question is not how many air conditioners can be financed. It is how thermal comfort can be expanded without locking cities into unaffordable energy demand and deepening inequality.

A market-only approach tends to reward households and firms that can buy equipment. The people most exposed to heat are often the least able to purchase or run it: outdoor workers, low-income households, street vendors, residents of poorly ventilated housing and people dependent on unreliable electricity. If cooling policy is reduced to appliance efficiency, it misses the distributional problem.

A public-infrastructure approach begins elsewhere. It asks how much heat can be avoided before mechanical cooling is needed. Reflective roofs, insulation, shading, ventilation, trees, water-sensitive design and building orientation reduce demand. Public cooling spaces protect people who cannot cool their homes. Efficient appliances and district or shared cooling can then meet part of the remaining need. Electricity planning has to anticipate the load. Health systems need protocols for those still exposed.

This is not an argument against air conditioning. In many places it will be essential. The stronger argument is that cooling should be treated as a system with multiple layers, because relying on a single technological response can create new vulnerabilities. A city in which everyone depends on individual air conditioners may become safer during normal heat but more fragile during a blackout.

There is also a financing problem. Many of the most valuable cooling interventions generate benefits that are difficult for a private investor to capture. A shaded street improves comfort for thousands of people but does not produce a simple cash flow. Better building codes reduce future energy demand but require public enforcement. Cool roofs may save low-income households money, but transaction costs can be high. Public cooling centres have social value but limited commercial revenue.

This is where the phrase ‘appropriate capital’ becomes practical. Commercial finance may be suitable for efficient cooling equipment and energy-service models. Public budgets may be necessary for streets, standards and public facilities. Philanthropy can support evidence, demonstration, community design and market formation. Concessional capital can absorb early-stage risk where new business models need to be proven. The system works when capital is assigned to the job it is good at.

The deeper lesson is that cooling is not a sector. It is a service that cuts across health, energy, housing, labour, food and urban design. That makes governance difficult, but it also creates a more ambitious opportunity: to design heat resilience around the outcome of safe thermal conditions rather than around a collection of disconnected projects.

Asian cities are likely to spend enormous sums on cooling over the coming decades one way or another. The real choice is whether that spending produces a more resilient public system or simply millions of private responses to a public problem.

Sources and further reading

• World Bank, Climate Investment Opportunities in India’s Cooling Sector (2022).

• Asian Development Bank work on extreme heat and pro-poor urban heat resilience.

• International Labour Organization, heat stress and labour productivity evidence.