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Net zero cold chains for food

The Carbon Trust has released a discussion paper outlining the challenge of reducing emissions from rapidly growing food cold chains and how philanthropy can help ‘bend the curve’ while enhancing food security and poverty reduction through net-zero food cold chains. Delivering affordable, nutritious, and safe food that provides good financial returns for producers while minimising the environmental and climate change impacts is challenging.Cold chains play a vital role in helping the food system deliver against many of these challenges, but conventional operations based on refrigerants with high global warming potential (GWP) and equipment that inefficiently uses energy can have significant environmental impacts. To avoid locking-in to high carbon, energy inefficient infrastructure, action is needed to develop net zero cold chains that reduce food waste and avoid emissions from high GWP refrigerants and inefficient equipment.

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