UNEP confirms support for World Refrigeration Day 2021

FRANCE: The UN Environment Programme’s (UNEP) OzonAction has affirmed its continued support for World Refrigeration Day (WRD) by again engaging as a main partner for this year’s event.

UNEP has been involved in World Refrigeration Day since its launch in 2019, helping the WRD secretariat to promote this celebratory day for the refrigeration and air conditioning sector. 

OzonAction participated in the successfully WRD campaigns in 2019 and 2020, which addressed the importance of refrigerants and the cold chain, respectively. We are now preparing to celebrate this year’s edition of WRD and encourage National Ozone Units, associations, and industry in this sector to do the same.

This year’s theme – Cooling Champions: Cool Careers for a Better World – aims to inspire students and young professionals in all countries, both women and men, to meet the challenges faced by their communities by pursuing careers in this vital sector.

For this year’s campaign, OzonAction and the WRD Secretariat are joining with key international partners: ASHRAE, the European Partnership for Energy and the Environment (EPEE), Federation of Ibero-American Air Conditioning and Refrigeration Associations (FAIAR), International Institute of Refrigeration (IIR), the Indian Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air Conditioning Engineers (ISHRAE), and the Union of Associations of African Actors in Refrigeration and Air Conditioning (U-3ARC).

For the last three decades, in UNEP’s capacity as an implementing agency of the Montreal Protocol’s Multilateral Fund, OzonAction has been at the heart of the battle to promote best practices and state-of-the-art technologies for the refrigeration and air conditioning sectors to eliminate the use of ozone depleting substances and minimise the use of high global warming potential substances. 

Through the WRD2021, UNEP OzonAction will cooperate with the campaign partners to shed light on areas, dimensions and opportunities that future refrigeration and air conditioning engineers, practitioners and experts need to consider for the industry to engage in a better society and sustainable communities. It is also hoped that the campaign will encourage more women and men to become interested in this sector – including its environmental protection dimension – as their professional career path.