What was the Million Cool Roofs Challenge?
The Million Cool Roofs Challenge was a global competition to rapidly scale up the deployment of highly solar-reflective “cool” roofs in developing countries suffering heat stress and lacking widespread access to cooling services. It is run by the Clean Cooling Collaborative (formerly K-CEP) in collaboration with the Global Cool Cities Alliance, Sustainable Energy for All (SEforALL), and Challenge Works, with support from the World Resources Institute.
Why did we do this?
Cooling is fundamental to the supply and storage of food, medicine and vaccines, and for ensuring the quality of life and productivity of citizens. Yet around the world millions of people die every year from causes related to a lack of access to cooling.
Reflective building surfaces reduce the demand for cooling energy for those that can afford it while also providing a sustainable passive cooling solution for the billions of people who do not have the economic means to access mechanical cooling options, in poor rural areas, urban slums and homeless shelters.
Reflective roof surfaces not only have an impact on individual buildings, but deploying them across a whole community can have a net effect on reducing local ambient temperatures. Further, the deployment of reflective materials creates sustainable jobs and skills opportunities for low skilled workers in both rural and urban contexts.
About the challenge
1.1 billion people…
face access to cooling risks across the world, including 630 million slum dwellers living in hotter-climate urban areas
Replacing a dark roof with a white roof…
can cool the top floor of the building by 2 to 3 degrees Celsius
2.3 billion people…
are likely to only be able to buy the most inefficient and energy-intensive air conditioning models, associated with higher greenhouse gas emissions
The winner – Cool Roofs Indonesia
Cool Roofs Indonesia was named as the winner of the Challenge on 1 March 2022.
The team is led by Beta Paramita, an Asst. Professor at UPI, in collaboration with Millennium Solution, USA and Ravi Srinivasan, a Professor at The University of Florida.
Overall, the team were able to install cool roofs in 15 cities on 70 buildings and have also piloted the solution on rural affordable housing structures, with an aim to update future building specifications to include cool roofs. The team measured and verified indoor air temperature reductions of over 10 degrees Celsius in some of the pilots.