Extreme heat caused by the looming super El Nino has created a costly dilemma for Asia-Pacific: expand access to air conditioning and cold storage without driving up electricity demand and undermining climate targets.

As deadly heat waves become more frequent, cooling needs are rising just as governments face pressure to meet their Paris Agreement pledges ahead of COP31, the United Nations climate change conference scheduled for Nov 9 to 20 in Turkiye.

"Cooling is a peak-demand problem rather than simply an annual energy problem," said Genevieve Donnellon-May, an associate research fellow at the Stockholm-based Institute for Security and Development Policy. "The priority should also be on reducing cooling demand before meeting it with more electricity."

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For developing Asian economies, clean power must also be affordable enough for households, businesses and industries to use at scale, she said, making cooling both a climate and an energy-security challenge.

"Governments also need to recognize that cooling access ultimately depends on access to abundant, affordable and reliable energy," she said.

For Samuel Chng Chong Wei, a senior research fellow at the Singapore University of Technology and Design, protecting people from extreme heat should be a government priority, especially amid a changing climate.

People should be able to live, work and participate in community life safely as temperatures rise, said Chng, who also heads the Urban Psychology Lab at the university.

"A household needs to be able to afford the running costs as well as the cooling equipment. A public cooling space needs to be reachable and available when people need it," he said.

Growing cooling demand is expected to drive up energy use and emissions. Global refrigeration and air-conditioning equipment generated an estimated 4.1 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide-equivalent emissions annually, the UN Environment Programme said last year.

The global stock of cooling equipment could more than triple by 2050, driven by population growth, rising incomes and more frequent extreme heat, it said.

At the Global Cooling Pledge Assembly in Singapore in September, participants drafted the Global Roadmap on Heat Resilience for a Warming World, a framework to help countries build resilience to extreme heat, safeguard essential services and reduce the climate impact of cooling.

A strengthened El Nino is expected to bring more heat in the coming months. The World Meteorological Organization said tropical Pacific sea surface temperatures could reach 3.8 degrees above average from November to January.

Recent heat waves have killed people and worsened air pollution across Asia. In Southeast Asia, scorching conditions have aggravated wildfires in Indonesia, intensifying seasonal haze. In South Korea, heat waves have killed dozens of people, with Seoul's daytime temperature reaching 30.1 C on Oct 12, broadcaster SBS reported.

The University of Chicago's Climate Impact Lab estimates that rising temperatures will hit the Global South particularly hard, potentially causing nearly 40,000 deaths in Southeast Asia and more than 15,000 in India.

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"The human and economic impact of extreme heat events is dramatic," said Alan Miller, senior managing director of the United States-based venture fund CoolPact Capital, which supports early-stage companies in India with sustainable cooling technologies and services.

Miller said heat waves not only claim lives but also cause huge economic losses. A 2022 heat wave in India, for example, caused an estimated $14 billion in food losses due to the absence of cold chains.

"The impact of heat extremes cascades throughout the economy as hospital admissions increase, power plant efficiency declines, food losses mount, construction work is halted, roads and other infrastructure deteriorate," Miller said, noting that the effects are "not linear".

"With increasing temperature, losses will accelerate and become more widespread and longer lasting," he said.

Contact the writers at prime@chinadailyapac.com