How Africans can stay cool as the climate warms
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. FEW PLACES on Earth are more familiar with the deadly consequences of extreme heat than countries in Africa. Heat kills crops, spoils food and medicines, and makes it impossible to work, study or sleep.
As the planet warms, the number of days when people on the continent will be exposed to excessively high temperatures is set to rise. How will they keep themselves, their food and their medicines cool? One answer is air-conditioning, which Lee Kwan Yew, Singapore’s founding father, once credited with changing “the nature of civilisation by making development possible in the tropics." Yet air-conditioning, while cooling people, worsens global warming through power use and refrigerant leakage and by warming the area around air-conditioned buildings. It also remains inaccessible to most Africans.
Only half the population has grid power. Even where it is stable, the cost of running an air-conditioner is forbiddingly high, partly because lax regulation means most are energy-intensive and inefficient. Only 5% of African homes have a unit, a percentage that has barely budged in two decades.
As temperatures and incomes rise, that number is likely to rise, and efforts are under way to make air-conditioning more sustainable. Yet given the unstable grid, lack of money and the need to limit emissions of greenhouse gases, other ways of keeping cool will be needed, too. For now, much climate-friendly innovation is concerned not with cooling people, but with ensuring that heat does not spoil their food and medicine.
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