A call to innovate, not compromise

To mark World Refrigeration Day, Hakan Bulgurlu, CEO of Beko, Europe’s leading home appliance brand, writes of HVACR’s pivotal role in the global energy and climate transition.

Refrigeration is the silent backbone of modern life. According to the World Refrigeration Day secretariat, over 5 billion refrigeration, air conditioning, and heat pump systems are in operation around the world.

The sector employs more than 15 million people and powers everything from pharmaceutical storage and digital infrastructure to agriculture and logistics.

We take these comforts for granted. But having stood in communities where cooling is a luxury – not a given – I have seen what happens when this essential service is missing.

Today, more than 1.2 billion people live without access to adequate cooling. That means spoiled food, unsafe vaccines, and extreme heat with no escape. 750 million still lack electricity entirely, and billions face frequent power outages. The result? Human suffering and devastating waste on an unimaginable scale. An estimated 526 million tonnes of food are lost annually due to lack of refrigeration – enough to feed a billion people. Imagine storing vaccines in 40°C heat or watching your harvest rot within days. For too many, this is not hypothetical – it is everyday life. And it is both a humanitarian and environmental crisis: food waste alone contributes up to 10% of global greenhouse gas emissions.

Here’s the paradox: cooling – the very technology that could solve this – has become a significant and rapidly growing source of carbon emissions. Household appliances now generate substantial emissions worldwide. Of those emissions, refrigerators alone account for 15%. And as incomes rise across the Global South, an estimated 2.3 billion people are approaching a level of affluence that will lead them to purchase basic but often inefficient refrigerators

If everyone who needed a refrigerator had one, there would be 4.2 billion domestic refrigerators in 2050 – a 121% increase from 2022. This is the double bind we face: cooling is essential to health, equity, and development, but if we don’t radically change how we cool, we risk making the planet unliveable.

That is why this year’s World Refrigeration Day, observed on 26 June, carries a critical message. Under the theme Cool Skills, the day celebrates both the technology and the people – the engineers, scientists, and technicians – who make sustainable cooling possible. It is an essential reminder that the solution to this crisis lies in innovation, skills development, and global collaboration. The solutions already exist. What we need now is the will to scale them.

Leading manufacturers have long believed that raising living standards must go hand in hand with protecting the planet. Beko has explicitly advocated for this in the Right to Refrigeration report that we published last year, calling for a fundamental shift in how the world approaches cooling – not as a luxury good, but as a human right and a climate imperative.

The report highlights the scale of the challenge, reframing innovation as the engine of equitable, low-carbon progress. It shows that the future of refrigeration depends not only on better products, but on building ecosystems of support. If cooling is to become both universal and sustainable, we need a new generation of thinkers and makers – backed by serious public and private investment – to lead the way.

The home appliances industry is already working on it. At Beko, we have developed a solar off-grid range – including a fridge/freezer and chest freezer. We also have a smart system that uses AI-driven behaviour analysis to adjust energy use and achieve energy savings of up to 20% through optimised fan speed, defrost cycles and cooling algorithms.

In the global North, these feel like upgrades. For much of the world, they’re lifelines.

But no single company will solve this alone. To make cooling sustainable and accessible for all, we need a full-system response. Governments must legislate for impact by setting mandatory, time-bound efficiency standards; industries must design for reality, investing in solutions that work where power is patchy, costs are high and climate stress is rising; financial institutions must redirect capital toward infrastructure and training needed to reach billions currently left out; and consumers must be empowered with the tools and information to make climate-conscious choices.

We can no longer afford to view sustainability and human progress as trade-offs. They are one and the same.

This demands global coordination to expand off-grid refrigeration, scale training programs for tomorrow’s cooling workforce, incentivise high-efficiency appliances, and build the infrastructure that makes equitable cooling possible.

The engineers, scientists, and technicians celebrated this World Refrigeration Day have the cool skills but that alone won’t cool the Earth. What they desperately need are the policies, investments and public will to match their ingenuity.

The question isn’t whether we can cool the planet sustainably – it’s whether we’ll move fast enough to give the next generation—of people, and of products—the power to deliver it.