Cooling as a Service (CaaS) was endorsed by the Global Innovation Lab for Climate Finance last week in the margins of the UN Climate Action Summit.

The Global Innovation Lab for Climate Finance, an initiative of over 60 public and private investors and institutions, accelerates much-needed investment solutions to support developing countries to meet their climate change and sustainable development goals. Created in 2014, the Lab has now launched 41 instruments that have collectively mobilised nearly USD 2 billion for action on climate change and sustainable development.

The Lab member institutions met last week at The Rockefeller Foundation in New York on the margins of the UNSG Climate Action Summit. Lab members voted to endorse all six financial mechanisms and enterprises in the Lab’s 2019 class, officially launching them for operation, and offering inputs for their implementation pathways. After going through a 7-month period of analysis, stress-testing, and design, the six instruments, Cooling as a Service was awarded this year as as one of the most innovative financial instruments to drive investment towards climate action.

CaaS is an initiative lead by BASE along with the Kigali Cooling Efficiency Program (K-CEP) ClimateWorks Foundation. CaaS aims to decrease energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions from cooling use in cities through a pay-per-service model for more efficient cooling systems. The model could save customers more than 20 per cent in lifetime spending on cooling equipment and could provide up to 30 per cent more profit for technology providers than the sale and operation of low-efficiency cooling systems.We have made significant progress towards initial implementation in the DominicanRepublic and Jamaica, and now are pursuing three to four larger flagship implementation projects, likely including South Africa, India, and Mexico.

For more information on CaaS, see the CaaS Initiative website or the Global Labs’s project page and the press release.