It takes a village: How community cooling can feed the world and fight climate change

The COVID-19 pandemic has certainly brought to light just how interconnected we all are. The world’s population will hit 10 billion in 2050 and we need to figure out how we’ll reasonably feed that many people, on both a local and global level. The food cold chain will play a role in how we meet this demand, but we also need to think about how we accomplish this feat without accelerating global warming. 

Throughout the world, millions of small farms and fisheries are a source of food and income within communities. Some of the challenges these local food producers face: maintaining the quality of their harvest while preventing loss, and finding accessible storage. Because we know a single cold storage facility is expensive and energy intensive, we need to think outside of the ice box. That’s where community cooling comes in, a concept that involves aggregating a community’s cooling demand at one location, creating what is essentially a cooling hub. That location could be an existing cold storage or food production facility, or even an ice rink. If a local food producer uses this already established infrastructure, this will reduce their costs while being far more energy efficient.