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India’s soaring demand for cooling technologies portends significant environmental concerns
Why in news?
- India as the fastest growing and rapidly urbanizing economy is projected to have the strongest growth in cooling demand worldwide.
- While India’s soaring demand in this sector is in line with the country’s developmental needs, it does portend significant environmental, social and economic concerns.
- The government’s launch of the India Cooling Action Plan (ICAP) on March 8 is a bold response to addressing India’s future cooling needs while neutralizing its impacts.
More in news
- What is the approach?(1) The space cooling sector the underlying thrust is to enable thermal comfort and well-being for all citizens by providing affordable and reliable cooling options, maintaining reliable electricity grids, and enhancing climate resilience of buildings and homes.(2) The thrust is on ensuring that the vulnerable populations, particularly children and the elderly, are not exposed to undue heat stresses.(3) ICAP proposes an approach that first reduces the cooling energy demand through climate appropriate and energy efficient building design, then serves the demand through energy efficient appliances and finally, controls and optimizes the demand through demand-side and user adaptation strategies, such as adaptive thermal comfort.(4) The plan lays special emphasis on enabling thermal comfort for the economically-weaker sections through climate-appropriate designs of affordable housing, and low-cost interventions to achieve better thermal insulation.
- Advantages of having ICAP:(1) Enhancing Productivity: Reducing heat-islands in urban areas, mitigating peak-load impacts and reducing the stress on the power systems, much of this would also free up capital for other developmental priorities.(2) Integrated Cold chain Infrastructure: It is needed to support adequate training and up-skilling of farmers and professionals. This results in economic well-being of farmers and reducing food losses thus strengthening food security and alleviating hunger-related issues.(3) Training and certification: It give an opportunity for providing increased employment, better livelihoods, and safer working practices for the HVAC (heating, ventilation and air conditioning) sector.(4) Building R&D ecosystem: ICAP’s emphasis on an innovative R&D ecosystem aims to drive the nation towards better utilization of public-funded R&D efforts that solve pressing issues related to the environment.
Source
Indian express.