Daniel Magallon, Managing Director of the BASE Foundation, winner of the Energy category, pictured with fellow winners of the 2026 Zayed Sustainability Prize.

The BASE Foundation has been awarded the 2026 Zayed Sustainability Prize in the Energy category, recognising its pioneering work on Cooling-as-a-Service, an innovative business model designed to make more clean, efficient and reliable cooling accessible without the need for upfront investment.

Widely regarded as one of the world’s most prestigious sustainability awards, the Zayed Sustainability Prize celebrates solutions that deliver real-world impact at scale. The BASE Foundation was selected from a pool of more than 7,000 applicants worldwide, with the jury highlighting the scalability, impact and market-transforming potential of the Cooling-as-a-Service model.

Rethinking Access to Cooling

As global temperatures rise and demand for cooling accelerates, access to reliable and energy-efficient cooling has become a critical development and climate challenge. Yet for many organisations and communities, particularly in emerging markets, high upfront costs, technical complexity and maintenance constraints remain major barriers.

Cooling-as-a-Service (CaaS) addresses these challenges by fundamentally rethinking how cooling is delivered. Instead of purchasing equipment, customers pay only for the cooling they use. Technology and service providers retain ownership of the systems and are responsible for performance, maintenance and repairs. This pay-per-use structure aligns incentives around efficiency, reliability and long-term operation, enabling the deployment of high-efficiency, modular, repairable and circular cooling solutions.

By removing financial, operational and technological barriers, CaaS has opened a viable pathway to climate-friendly cooling across sectors such as healthcare, agriculture, education, telecommunications and small businesses, where reliable cooling can have an immediate and transformative impact.

Delivering Measurable Impact

To date, Cooling-as-a-Service initiatives supported by BASE Foundation have delivered tangible results:

• More than 160,000 people have benefited from improved access to cooling
• Over 130 GWh of electricity are saved each year
• Approximately 81,000 tonnes of CO₂ emissions are avoided annually
• Around 2,500 green jobs have been supported

This impact has been achieved through collaboration with a global network of more than 80 partner organisations, including solution providers, financiers, policymakers and local implementers.

To further institutionalise and scale this work, the BASE Foundation launched the Servitisation for Energy Transition (SET) Alliance in 2022. The SET Alliance is a global, multi-stakeholder platform dedicated to advancing servitisation approaches, which shift the focus from selling equipment to delivering efficient, reliable energy services. Through the SET Alliance, the BASE Foundation works to mobilise partners, capital and innovation to accelerate the energy transition.

The SET Alliance brings together several of BASE Foundation’s as-a-service initiatives, each tailored to specific contexts and needs:

• Servetia focuses on the Swiss market and explores how service-based energy models can support the country’s energy and climate objectives. Supported by Fondation Valery and implemented in collaboration with the Enterprise for Society Center, Servetia enables users to benefit from efficient and clean energy systems (heating, lighting, cooling and solar photovoltaics) without having to purchase the equipment upfront.
  
• Your Virtual Cold Chain Assistant is a collaboration between the BASE Foundation and the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology (Empa). The initiative supports the deployment of solar-powered cold rooms for smallholder farmers across Asia and Africa. Its digital backbone, the Coldtivate application, enables inventory management in facilities operating under Cooling as a Service and uses physics-based models to predict the remaining shelf life of crops in storage, helping reduce food loss and improve farmer livelihoods.
  
• Efficiency-as-a-Service is an initiative that helps create the conditions for small and medium-sized enterprises to access more climate-friendly technologies. Previously deployed across Europe in collaboration with partners including Agoria, ANESE and InnoEnergy, the project contributed valuable lessons that continue to inform BASE’s servitisation work under the SET Alliance.

Together, these initiatives demonstrate how service-based business models can be adapted to different markets and sectors, delivering climate impact while improving affordability, performance and long-term sustainability.

Recognition from the Prize Jury

Dr. Lamya Fawwaz, Executive Director of the Zayed Sustainability Prize, praised the organisation’s work:

“The Zayed Sustainability Prize champions solutions that make clean energy commercially viable, affordable and accessible. BASE Foundation’s Cooling-as-a-Service model is helping communities overcome financial barriers to sustainable cooling while supporting shared prosperity, resilience, and long-term growth.”

Daniel Magallón, Managing Director of BASE Foundation, added:

“This Prize is not only a recognition of BASE’s work, but a powerful amplifier of the collective effort behind it. It allows us to build a global movement capable of driving systemic market transformation in sustainable cooling. Achieving this shift requires a critical mass of committed stakeholders working together worldwide, and the Zayed Sustainability Prize strengthens our ability to convene that community and accelerate lasting impact.”

Over the past 18 years, the Zayed Sustainability Prize and its 128 winners have positively impacted more than 400 million lives worldwide, inspiring a global ripple effect of innovation and positive change.

Accelerating Global Scale-up

The USD 1 million Prize fund will enable BASE Foundation to accelerate the expansion of Cooling as a Service across Africa, Asia, Europe, the Middle East and Latin America. Planned activities include:

• Training more than 100 local technicians, SMEs and energy service companies
  
• Developing region-specific CaaS toolkits
  
• Launching pilot projects in new countries
  
• Expanding open-access performance monitoring systems, such as Coldtivate
  
• Supporting the integration of energy storage and smart management solutions
  

Through these efforts, BASE aims to reach over 500,000 additional end-users, support the deployment of 10,000 metric tonnes of efficient cooling capacity, and further scale affordable, low-carbon cooling solutions across multiple sectors.

About BASE Foundation

The BASE Foundation is a Swiss-based non-profit organisation dedicated to accelerating the energy transition through innovative business models, financial mechanisms and market-enabling solutions. Working with public and private partners around the world, the BASE Foundation supports the scale-up of climate solutions that deliver measurable environmental, social and economic impact.