The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) is the leading global environmental authority that sets the global environmental agenda, promotes the coherent implementation of the environmental dimension of sustainable development within the United Nations system and serves as an authoritative advocate for the global environment.
The UNEP Cities Unit supports integrated approaches across all sectors to drive low-carbon, resilient, inclusive, pollution-free urban development with specific thematic focus on built environment and urban infrastructure, cooling and urban energy, urban food systems, circularity, and nature-based solutions. UNEP is accelerating the global transition to energy-efficient and climate-friendly cooling. Getting the right solutions in place for cooling is essential for improving the quality of life and health of people without undue impacts on the planet.
The Cool Coalition is a global multi-stakeholder network that connects a wide range of key actors from government, cities, international organizations, businesses, finance, academia, and civil society groups to facilitate knowledge exchange, advocacy and joint action towards a rapid global transition to efficient and climate-friendly cooling. Established in 2019 as transformative initiative of the UN Secretary-General’s Climate Action Summit, the Cool Coalition is the global multistakeholder platform to support countries take comprehensive and integrated action on sustainable cooling and thereby deliver on the Paris Agreement, Kigali Amendment and the SDGs. Comprehensive, integrated action is defined as taking joint action on passive cooling, energy efficiency and refrigerant phase down in line with a pathway to cut 60% of emissions from the sector while increasing access to life-saving cooling (UNEP Cool Coalition Global Cooling Watch 2023).
The Coalition convenes expertise across the cooling value chain to collaborate on science, policy and advocacy that underpin political commitments and their implementation and to develop and test methodologies that require demonstration to be later scaled by partners. Since 2023 serves as the secretariat to the Global Cooling Pledge and its 72 countries, and tracks progress on its targets including through the biannual Global Cooling Watch report which was the science that underpinned the Pledge targets.
A consultant is needed to
1) support Cool Coalition coordinate the development of the 2025 Global Cooling Watch (“the Report”) for launch ahead of COP30 in Brazil, with a deep dive focus on adaptation and resilience to extreme heat,
2) support Pledge implementation strategy with countries and
3) provide contribution to G20 as requested by G20 organizers on cooling, buildings, energy for the ETWG meetings in July and September.