Cooling Poverty

A Need Of The Hour / Thermal Injustice

Author: Mahum Ahmad, LABLAB (2026)

More than a billion people in 77 countries are at increased risk of inadequate access to essential cooling services, including hundreds of millions of the rural and urban poor. The expected rise in the use of air conditioning, which is expected to more than double the global stock of air conditioners and triple the associated electricity consumption by mid-century, creates a critical paradox in which mechanical cooling relies on, but also destabilises, already stressed energy systems, while the waste heat from air conditioning exacerbates the urban heat island effects and the problem of global warming.

Against the background of accelerating global warming and rapid urbanisation, access to cooling, and the manner in which it is secured, has emerged as a major equity challenge of the twenty-first century, driven by the structural inequalities of uneven development, infrastructure, and the market-oriented energy regime.

In this paper, the notion of Systemic Cooling Poverty (SCP) is furthered as a conceptual framework to understand the structural inability to maintain thermally safe indoor conditions, as conceptualised in Mazzone et al. (2023). SCP extends the notion of energy poverty by including the following dimensions: climate, thermally safe infrastructure and assets, social and thermal inequality, health, and education and work standards. This understanding of cooling poverty is set in the context of broader configurations of passive cooling infrastructure, social support systems, and knowledge of adaptation, rather than the simple possession of appliances.

The argument is based on three strands of critical urban theory. The concept of "right to the city," developed by Lefebvre, is rethought as "right to thermal habitation", where unequal exposure to heat is considered to be a form of spatial dispossession. The concept of "spatial justice," developed by Soja, helps to clarify how thermal inequality is related to other forms of spatial injustices that marginalised communities experience. The concept of "thermal justice" places cooling poverty at the crossroads of environmental and spatial justice.

Cooling poverty is best understood as a "crisis of absence" in the Global South and a "crisis of presence" in the Global North. The "crisis of absence" is caused by insufficient grids, capacities, and infrastructures, whereas the "crisis of presence" is caused by the legacy buildings in the North that now trap heat. Both create a "thermal underclass" that is denied access to indoor temperatures and thus highlights the need to rethink cooling as an urban right that is operationalised through design and energy policy.

Pakistan’s Energy-Thermal Crisis: The Grid as a Site of Dispossession

Approximately 50 million people in Pakistan lack access to the electrical grid, and cities such as Karachi experience prolonged power interruptions lasting eight to eighteen hours per day. Pakistan’s electricity mix in 2024 reflects significant dependence on fossil fuels, which account for about 53 per cent of total generation, with natural gas making up nearly one-quarter and coal constituting 14 per cent. The Oil and Gas Development Company Limited (OGDCL) has indicated that Pakistan’s indigenous natural gas reserves are projected to be depleted within the next 15 years. The gas shortage is a key vulnerability for Pakistan and Bangladesh, which rely largely on gas for electricity generation; both have been forced to limit liquefied natural gas imports due to rising prices driven by increased European demand during the Ukraine crisis. This energy precarity is not a temporary disruption but a structural condition rooted in decades of underinvestment, circular debt, and a generation mix that remains tethered to volatile global commodity markets.

The household power structure in Pakistan is defined by a paradoxical “reliability gap” that transforms nominal energy access into a state of chronic vulnerability. While official data indicates near-universal electrification in urban areas, the World Bank’s Pakistan Energy Access Survey 2024 reveals that only 3 per cent of households enjoy a truly reliable supply. For the remaining majority, “connection” to the grid does not translate to cooling capacity; rather, it facilitates a cycle of intermittent service, with load shedding lasting 12 to 18 hours during peak summer months. This persistent unreliability has caused per capita electricity consumption to remain stagnant since 2006, trapping low-income households in a state of systemic cooling poverty where the infrastructure exists but the energy service fails. The 2018 Global Competitiveness Report ranked Pakistan 115th out of 137 economies in energy supply reliability. For the urban poor in megacities like Karachi and Lahore, the grid is not an enabler of thermal comfort but a source of chronic uncertainty — a system that promises electricity yet delivers rationing, leaving households unable to plan, unable to cool, and unable to escape the thermal consequences of its failure.

From an urban studies perspective, this energy deficit functions as a regressive “thermal tax.” In 2022 and 2023, extreme heat exposure resulted in an estimated USD 16 billion loss in labour productivity, roughly 4.4 per cent of Pakistan’s GDP, a burden felt most acutely by daily-wage workers and those in informal settlements. Furthermore, cooling poverty in Pakistan is profoundly gendered. Social norms and the domestic “kitchen economy” confine women to the most thermally oppressive areas of the home during peak heat hours; poorly ventilated cooking spaces and the absence of reliable mechanical cooling lead to high rates of heat syncope, chronic fatigue, and thermal distress. The intersection of gender, poverty, and thermal vulnerability in Pakistan reveals that cooling poverty is not a technologically neutral condition; it is shaped by the same patriarchal structures that govern labour, mobility, and domestic space, amplifying existing inequalities along lines of gender and class.

Mobility Poverty as Thermal Poverty

The Mazzone et al. SCP framework explicitly identifies mobility as a dimension of cooling deprivation: “an inaccessible, unsafe or excessively costly transportation system limits people’s mobility and, subsequently, their capacity to find cooler places to regulate their internal temperatures.” In this way, the inadequacies in the transportation sector intertwine with thermal rights, which include the ability to seek refuge in nearby cooling centres such as blue and green spaces, libraries, and other conditioned environments during extreme heat events. Mobility poverty, understood in this framework, is not simply about the absence of buses or roads; it is about the spatial foreclosure of thermoregulatory options, the inability to move from zones of danger to zones of safety when the heat becomes life-threatening.

In rural Sindh, this dimension assumes its most extreme form. In water-scarce regions like Tharparkar — situated in the Thar Desert on the eastern border of Sindh — women bear the burden of carrying an average of 90 litres of water over long distances to meet domestic needs, even during pregnancy, in temperatures that routinely reach 50 degrees Celsius. This is not merely a water access problem; it is a spatial manifestation of cooling poverty. Mobility poverty, in this context, is not a secondary concern; it is a primary mechanism through which thermal injustice is produced and reproduced.

The UHI Feedback Loop: Waste Heat, Green Space Deficit, and Spatial Formation

The relationship between air conditioning, waste heat, and the urban heat island effect constitutes a self-reinforcing cycle that disproportionately penalises low-income urban residents. Research has documented that residual heat from air conditioning can cause nighttime temperature increases of up to 1 degree Celsius in urban areas, precisely the period when the human body requires thermal recovery from daytime heat stress. Increased energy demand for air conditioning ranges from 1 to 9 per cent for each 1 degree Celsius increase in temperature, creating a feedback loop. This thermodynamic vicious circle is not an abstraction; it is measurable, spatially patterned, and socially stratified. This feedback loop is spatially structured by urban morphology. In high-density areas, the “urban canyon effect” — narrow streets surrounded by tall buildings — limits air circulation, causing heat to become trapped and accumulate.

The London UHI study published in Cities & Health (2025) found that vulnerable populations in Greater London experience surface temperatures up to 4 degrees Celsius hotter than wealthier populations, with a 6 to 9 per cent decline in pedestrian accessibility in temperature hotspots. These heat-exposed streets further limit mobility for vulnerable communities, compounding socio-spatial inequalities. The urban canyon does not merely trap heat; it traps people, restricting the movement of those who lack the resources to escape to cooler environments and reinforcing the spatial concentration of thermal risk.

Green space provides the primary counterweight to UHI, yet its distribution mirrors existing inequality. A 2024 Nature study assessing the 500 largest cities globally found that Global South cities have only two-thirds the cooling capacity and cooling benefit compared to Global North cities—a 1.5-fold gap attributable to differences in both quantity and quality of urban green infrastructure, shaped by socioeconomic and natural factors. Within cities, the “luxury effect” concentrates green space in affluent neighbourhoods, transforming what should be a public good into a de facto class amenity. In Pakistani megacities like Karachi, unregulated densification has consumed green spaces at rates that outpace any compensatory planting, while the absence of urban design codes governing building orientation, setbacks, and street canyon ratios ensures that heat-retaining spatial formations persist unchallenged.

The implication for alleviating poverty is straightforward: the waste heat produced by individuals who can afford mechanical cooling diminishes the thermal environment for those who cannot. The urban poor live in areas with the highest UHI intensity, which are high-density, low-canopy, heat-retaining areas, but they don't have the means to leave them. This is not a random geographic correlation; it is a fundamental aspect of how cities in the Global South are created, illustrating what Soja would characterise as the political organisation of space as a source of spatial injustice.

The Pakistan Cooling Action Plan: Ambition and Implementation Deficit

The Pakistan Cooling Action Plan (P-CAP), formally integrated into the 2025 Nationally Determined Contributions, represents the primary regulatory response to the country’s “cooling paradox” — the urgent need to expand thermal comfort without collapsing an overstretched urban grid. The plan targets a 50 per cent reduction in cooling sector emissions by 2030 and aligns with the Kigali Amendment’s goal of an 80 per cent reduction in hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) by 2047. By enforcing Minimum Energy Performance Standards (MEPS) through NEECA, the P-CAP aims to mitigate a projected 3,000 megawatt surge in peak demand. For megacities like Karachi, this policy is a prerequisite for grid stability, directly targeting the inefficient appliances that currently drive circular debt and trigger prolonged load-shedding cycles.

However, the P-CAP faces fundamental structural challenges. Pakistan’s reliance on outdated refrigerant technology remains a significant liability. Before 2010, R22 (Freon) was widely utilised in cooling technologies but was later discovered to be extremely harmful to the ozone layer. While developed countries launched replacement plans, China used Pakistan as a destination for soon-to-be-discarded obsolete AC units at reduced rates, flooding the domestic market with technology that other nations were phasing out. The persistence of high-GWP refrigerants in Pakistan’s cooling stock means that any expansion of access simultaneously increases the environmental burden — a tension the P-CAP acknowledges but has not yet resolved with a comprehensive refrigerant transition strategy.

The plan also lacks detailed roadmaps and actionable steps to achieve its targets. While it identifies the need for energy-efficient building codes and appliance standards, it provides no clear guidelines or timeline for adoption and enforcement. Progress has been piecemeal and inconsistent. Most critically, the P-CAP does not adequately address the cooling needs of the most vulnerable populations. Low-income households, often living in densely populated, poorly ventilated areas, struggle to afford even the most basic cooling options. Programmes to subsidise cooling appliances or improve housing insulation have been limited in scope and impact.

The focus on scaling up high-efficiency household appliances, such as brushless DC ceiling fans (BLDC), which require approximately 65 per cent less energy than conventional fans, represents a promising demand-side strategy. The widespread adoption of energy-efficient technology, as demonstrated by the success of LED lightbulb programmes in India, serves as a model. Yet without equitable distribution mechanisms, these gains risk being captured by middle and upper-income households, replicating the solar divide at the appliance level. India’s pioneering 2019 Cooling Action Plan (ICAP) and Bangladesh’s 2022 National Cooling Plan provide comparative frameworks, but Pakistan’s delayed adoption — originally targeted for 2026 — reflects a persistent gap between policy ambition and institutional capacity. Addressing cooling poverty in Pakistan requires moving beyond market-based AC solutions toward what this paper terms a 'National Energy Resilience Framework' — one that prioritises passive cooling design, equitable pro-poor renewable energy subsidies, and enforceable building codes that account for both winter and summer thermal performance.

Europe’s Structural Thermal Gap: The Envelope as a Site of Entrapment

While Europe has historically prioritised “heating poverty” within its social policy frameworks, the increasing frequency and intensity of extreme heat events are exposing a systemic lack of preparedness for summer cooling. The catastrophic 2003 European heatwave, which claimed approximately 70,000 lives, served as an early warning of the region’s “thermal fragility.” Since then, temperatures have continued to rise; by 2025, Europe has consistently tracked as the fastest-warming continent on Earth. In 2022 alone, over 60,000 Europeans died from heat in just three months. Under the current trajectory of 1.5 degrees Celsius global warming, average heat fatalities are expected to increase from around 2,700 to 30,000 per year by 2050. This shift has transitioned extreme heat from a Mediterranean anomaly to a continent-wide threat, demanding a fundamental reassessment of how European cities, buildings, and welfare systems are designed.

In contrast to the 90 per cent AC adoption rate in the United States, only about 19 per cent of European households currently possess air conditioning. This low penetration rate masks a deepening “cooling gap” where access to thermal safety is dictated by socio-economic status. Data from the 2024 EU-SILC survey reveals that while 1 in 10 Europeans struggle with winter heating, a staggering 26 per cent of households — rising to 35 percent among low-income groups — now report an inability to keep their homes comfortably cool in summer. This inadequacy is most acute in Southern and Eastern Europe, where dwellings are often poorly insulated for heat and the UHI effect is intensified by dense, asphalt-heavy city centres. The asymmetry is striking: European social policy has developed decades of institutional infrastructure to address winter fuel poverty, including fuel allowances, efficiency grants, and emergency heating provisions, yet possesses almost no equivalent apparatus for summer thermal distress.

The European push for energy efficiency has inadvertently intensified cooling risks through what this paper terms the “Airtightness Paradox.” European building stock — more than 50 per cent of which predates 1970 — was engineered for cold-weather resilience, prioritising high thermal mass and airtightness to retain winter warmth. To meet net-zero goals, current renovation standards under the Fit-for-55 package emphasise extreme insulation and the elimination of air leaks. While excellent for reducing winter carbon footprints, these highly insulated envelopes act as thermal incubators during heatwaves. Research at Loughborough University and the University of East London confirms this paradox: homes rated EPC A and B — the most energy-efficient categories — are 1.5 times more likely to overheat than less efficient dwellings, and UK overheating reports rocketed from 18 percent in 2011 to 80 per cent in 2022. Without mechanical cooling, low-income residents find themselves trapped in buildings where indoor temperatures can exceed outdoor ambient heat by 4 to 5 degrees Celsius.

This is, in effect, an iatrogenic condition — a disease caused by the treatment. The EU’s energy efficiency drive, by mandating extreme insulation without simultaneously mandating overheating mitigation, has produced a new form of thermal vulnerability among the very populations it claims to protect. Unlike many traditional South Asian dwellings designed with high ceilings, open courtyards, and mandatory cross-ventilation to dissipate humidity and heat, modern European apartments often lack dual-aspect windows. This single-sided design makes purge ventilation impossible, effectively turning homes into “thermal batteries” that absorb solar radiation during the day and fail to cool down at night. The result is a built environment that performs well on winter energy metrics while systematically failing its occupants during the increasingly frequent and intense summer heat events that define the new European climate reality.

From an environmental justice perspective, this creates what can be described as a “silent inequality.” Low-income populations residing in social housing blocks are characterised by: poor orientation and lack of external shading (rolladen or shutters) which can reduce solar gain by up to 80 percent; volumetric heat gain from high glazing-to-wall ratios in modern budget constructions lacking the overhangs found in tropical design; and in maritime climates like the UK or Ireland, high indoor humidity levels of approximately 60 to 70 percent that render even basic electric fans ineffective for evaporative cooling. These are not design oversights; they are the predictable consequences of a building regulatory framework that has treated thermal comfort as a winter-only concern, and that has failed to anticipate the speed and severity of climate change’s impact on the European built environment.

Europe’s regulatory landscape is only now beginning to pivot. The 2024 Energy Performance of Buildings Directive (EPBD), to be transposed into national laws by May 2026, finally introduces “overheating” as a critical metric for building safety. Yet a conflict remains between adaptation and mitigation. As households seek relief, the surge in inefficient portable AC units threatens to derail the EU Green Deal. The Cool Heating Coalition’s Marine Cornelis has observed that Europe does not even have consistent terminology around summer energy poverty: “We don’t even have consistent keywords. That makes it hard to coordinate funding, research, and innovation.” The EU BUILD UP platform’s 2025 analysis notes that only 10 of 27 Member States have explicit energy poverty reduction targets, and the transposition of key directives remains incomplete. This regulatory void is itself evidence of the argument: Europe’s welfare state, designed for cold, has no institutional vocabulary for thermal safety in summer.

Convergence: The Global Thermal Underclass

In the Global South, we observe a struggle for the basic right to reliable wattage and breathable architecture — what might be termed a crisis of absolute deprivation. For millions, thermal safety is precluded by chronic energy poverty and a “connectedness without power.” In cities like Karachi, the urban poor are trapped in thermally aggressive, high-density environments where the lack of reliable electricity renders even rudimentary adaptation impossible. The reliance on inefficient, high-emission legacy technologies creates a vicious cycle: the very tools used to survive localised heat contribute to the macro-climatic instability that intensifies it.

Conversely, in Europe, cooling poverty manifests as a crisis of structural lock-in. The issue is inextricably linked to a building stock designed for a climate that no longer exists — one that prioritises heat retention over dissipation. The Airtightness Paradox, while successful in reducing winter carbon footprints, has inadvertently turned low-income social housing into thermal incubators. As wealthier households insulate themselves through private, high-efficiency cooling, the European thermal underclass faces a regressive energy burden, spending a disproportionate share of income to achieve marginal relief in homes that lack even basic cross-ventilation.

The Nature study on global green space cooling inequality provides the spatial evidence for this convergence: a 1.5-fold gap in cooling benefits between Global South and Global North cities, attributable not merely to AC access but to the entire urban landscape’s capacity to dissipate heat. Both contexts share three structural features. First, the poorest and most disadvantaged people, who contributed the least to global warming, bear the most severe consequences of extreme heat. Second, the market mechanisms intended to address cooling — whether solar panels in Pakistan or portable AC units in Europe — are captured by those who least need them, deepening inequality. Third, the regulatory frameworks are either absent (as in Pakistan’s delayed PCAP) or internally contradictory (as in Europe’s insulation-without-ventilation mandate).

At the heart of this global crisis is a profound geopolitical and ethical imbalance. While the Global North grapples with the waste of abundant energy resources and a sluggish transition toward renewables, the Global South faces an explosive surge in demand necessitated by survival. The cooling gap cannot be closed by technology alone. As long as energy is treated as a surplus to be optimised in the West and a scarcity to be rationed in the South, the lived experience of thermal deprivation will remain a global constant.

Whether it is a woman in Tharparkar carrying 90 litres of water across a desert at 50 degrees Celsius, or an elderly resident in a Paris social housing block trapped in an airtight apartment, the thermal underclass is increasingly defined by a shared exclusion from the safety of the thermostat. In an era where thermal safety is becoming a prerequisite for life, the question is whether our future cities will be designed as collective cool havens or whether they will remain fragmented landscapes of air-conditioned fortresses and unlivable heat zones.

Conclusion: Toward Thermal Sovereignty

The crisis of cooling poverty reveals a bifurcated reality between the Global South and the Global North, yet both are anchored by a common failure of distributive justice. If the twentieth century was defined by the struggle for universal heating and electrification, the twenty-first century is being defined by the struggle for what this paper terms thermal sovereignty — the capacity of individuals and communities to maintain safe body temperatures through a combination of reliable energy services, climate-responsive built environments, and equitable access to cooling resources.

Addressing this crisis requires moving beyond market-based solutions. In the Global South, this means developing National Energy Resilience Frameworks that prioritise passive cooling design — high ceilings, cross-ventilation, reflective surfaces, and strategic urban greening — alongside equitable, pro-poor renewable energy subsidies that prevent the solar divide from becoming entrenched. Building codes must be reformed to account for summer thermal performance, not only winter efficiency. In Europe, the imperative is to resolve the Airtightness Paradox by integrating mandatory overheating protections into the EPBD implementation, funding external shading retrofits for social housing, and establishing “summer energy poverty” as a distinct policy category with its own indicators, targets, and funding streams.

Both contexts demand a reconceptualisation of cooling as infrastructure rather than appliance — a public good embedded in the design of cities, buildings, streets, and transport networks rather than a private commodity available only to those who can afford it. The Vanderbilt University report on thermal justice (2026) calls for a fundamental shift from individual advice to collective, culturally grounded, and systematic solutions — recognising heat events as natural disasters, enacting policies for heat-sensitive work schedules, and investing in shade infrastructure to achieve genuine thermal justice.

Can we truly claim to be advancing a global green transition if our climate-resilient buildings remain exclusive fortresses, while the majority of the world’s urban population is left to navigate a warming planet in dwellings that have become thermal traps? The answer to this question will define whether the twenty-first century achieves thermal sovereignty for all, or merely entrenches the thermal divide.