Air conditioning causes around 3% of greenhouse gas emissions. How will this change in the future?

Air conditioning is truly a lifesaver for some people in the world. For many more, it makes extreme heat tolerable. Those who work indoors can do so productively, kids can learn better at school, and people can sleep comfortably at night during the summer.1

Research shows that air conditioning (AC) effectively reduces heat mortality during heatwaves. The 2021 Lancet Countdown report estimated that air conditioning prevented almost 200,000 premature deaths in 2019.2

Demand for air conditioning is bound to increase. One reason is climate change: as the world warms, more people will be exposed to heat waves, and those who already live in hot climates will experience more intense ones. But that’s not the only — or even the biggest — driver of demand. The biggest driver is rising incomes.

It’s already extremely hot in countries like India or Indonesia. If people could afford AC today, they would have it.

This will happen over the next few decades as incomes grow in many low-to-middle-income countries.

Today, there are around 2 billion air conditioning units in the world. The International Energy Agency (IEA) projects that this could almost triple to over 5.5 billion by 2050, as shown in the chart below.3 Even then, many who need — and would want — AC won’t be able to afford it, so if countries can increase incomes more quickly or AC units get cheaper, then this number could be even higher.

But AC units require a lot of energy to cool us down. How will the world be able to meet the energy demand for AC? And what might the climate impacts of this be?

In this article, I look at the current energy use, and carbon emissions of AC and what they might look like in the future.