Ghana’s refrigeration and air conditioning sector, which offers cooling services has grown steadily in the last ten years. This has been propelled by nationwide electricity coverage, rapid urbanization, population growth, expanding middle class, and rising incomes.

To drive the sector’s rapid transition to high-performance cooling equipment and adopt best standard technologies, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Energy Commission, in partnership with the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) with funding from the Clean Cooling Collaborative, formerly known as Kigali Cooling Efficiency Programme, developed and released a National Cooling Plan for Ghana.  

The plan among other things, if implemented, will contribute to Ghana’s climate action efforts towards the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Thus, transitioning to energy efficient refrigeration and air condition technologies offers great potential savings in electricity use and will help reduce emissions into the environment towards achieving efficient and clean cooling.   

As part of the strategies, the plan recommends the replacement of outdated fridges with clean and efficient types on the market, whilst intensifying end-user education to encourage the transformation to clean and efficient equipment in domestic refrigeration. 

To effectively disseminate the actions in the National Cooling Plan among stakeholders and to also ensure national ownership for it to be adopted as a national working document, a national dissemination workshop was held for stakeholders from Government ministries and agencies, academia, private sector and refrigeration associations.

“The implementation of the plan would result in a significant greenhouse gases reduction from Ghana’s refrigeration and air condition sector”, noted Emmanuel Osae-Quansah, the Programme Coordinator at National Ozone Office of EPA Ghana at the workshop.

The implementation of the Ghana National Cooling Plan is expected to consolidate the gains the country has made towards meeting her international obligations such as the Montreal Protocol on the elimination of ozone-depleting chemicals. It will also serve as input to Ghana’s climate pledges under the Paris Agreement on climate change.