A major programme, led by the University of Birmingham and UNEP United for Efficiency, is extending its work in Africa over the next 12 months to speed the transition to clean cold – reducing food loss and improve vaccine and health supply chains.
Thanks to ongoing UK funding through the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), the £29 million Sustainable Cooling and Cold-chain Systems (SCCCS) programme will launch online training, roll out a portfolio of new design and impact models, and support innovation, manufacturing, and assembly.
The programme is a flagship, inclusive systems-based approach that will enable resilient and sustainable cold chain expansion and investment. It aims to address the urgent need for cold-chain in rural communities and ensure that new cooling solutions are environmentally sustainable and well-integrated.
The Africa Centre of Excellence for Sustainable Cooling and Cold-chain (ACES), in Kigali, Rwanda, is now regularly hosting 200 students a week on campus.
Project principal Toby Peters, Professor of Cold Economy at the University of Birmingham, commented: “On the one hand, access to cold-chain for rural communities remains patchy at best in Africa. This failure of the system is resulting in unsustainable food loss and wasted economic opportunity for subsistence farmers.
“But, without intervention and new approaches being brought into market, new cold-chain investments will result in high direct and indirect emissions and arbitrary deployment of individual assets rather than a cohesively designed and integrated systems approach that converges diverse cooling requirements across the system.”
The system-level approach developed by CSC underpins the programme’s strategy: to simultaneously address the urgent needs for cold-chain in rural communities and ensure that new cooling solutions are environmentally sustainable and well-integrated.
Led by academics from University of Birmingham, the team is launching new design models to enable governments and development agencies to understand and develop optimised and future-proofed cold-chain for food and health.
Models include the capability to build and test the whole system virtually, evaluate the holistic benefits and cost of cold-chain infrastructure in specific local contexts and over different timeframes, allowing greater integration of cold-chain plans with country development plans, priorities, and future needs and challenges, including climate change.
Data gathering and auditing tools can quantify the impact and guide on-going programme development, ensuring that investments yield measurable benefits.
“Our goal is to make sustainable, resilient and equitable cooling and cold-chain a cornerstone of development,’ said Professor Peters. “Cooling and cold-chain are critical national infrastructure. ACES is the first-of-its-kind centre providing the essential tools, knowledge, training, GESI understanding and support to implement inclusive, equitable, and future-proofed solutions with minimal environmental impact.”
In sub-Saharan Africa, about 37% of all food is lost between production and consumption, and the lack of pre-cooling facilities is estimated to account for nearly half of these losses. In Africa, subsistence farming accounts for 90% of food produced with more than 80% of smallholder farmers in Africa still producing at the subsistence level.
Approximately 60% of the African population engages in subsistence farming, contributing to 23% of Africa’s GDP. Yet, inadequate cold-chain infrastructure means much of their produce perishes before reaching markets.
This has global implications: the UK, for example, imports 80% of fruit and 47% of vegetables – dependent on the temperature-controlled supply chain. Strengthening cold-chain systems in Africa can reduce food loss locally while supporting more robust and sustainable supply chains worldwide.
PHOTO CAPTION – please credit Chris de Bode: Experts testing equipment at the Africa Centre of Excellence for Sustainable Cooling and Cold-Chain (ACES)
