Rather than treating cooling solely as a demand-side energy issue, initiatives supported by the India Cooling Action Plan frame access to safe and efficient cooling as a public health priority linked to climate mitigation and adaptation goals, a report by a United Nations body said on Tuesday (June 30, 2026).
The report titled ‘Asia-Pacific synergies report: Advancing synergistic solutions to the triple planetary crisis and the SDGs’ said that framing cooling as a health and safety issue strengthened political support and facilitated coordination across energy, urban, labour and social sectors.
“Conventional expansion of air conditioning risks locking in higher emissions, worsening air pollution and exacerbating energy poverty if not managed carefully,” the report by the Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP) said.
It said that while policies to manage these issues are often national in scope, implementation has progressed mainly through programmes and pilot initiatives in several states and urban regions, reflecting the diversity of climate risks, electricity systems and cooling demand across the country.
“In response to rising temperature and extreme heat, India has advanced sustainable cooling initiatives, including programmes implemented through the Energy Efficiency Services Limited and supported by the India Cooling Action Plan (ICAP), with implementation taking place through programmes and pilot initiatives across several states and cities,” the report read.
Citing measures like promotion of high-efficiency cooling appliances, improvements in building energy performance and demand-side management approaches that reduce peak electricity loads during extreme heat events, the report said the initiatives are supported by policies that align heat-risk management, energy planning and climate strategies.
It also mentioned that the initiatives integrate health objectives into energy efficiency, cooling technology deployment and system planning.
The report also highlighted conserving biodiversity through nature-positive pathways and underscored that achieving this in the Asia-Pacific region requires an enabling environment capable of supporting integrated, systemic and transformative action.
“Synergistic approaches are regarded as potentially transformative responses to interrelated biodiversity and other environmental challenges. Their potential reflects the fact that biodiversity is not an isolated environmental issue but the foundation of resilient and inclusive development itself,” the report said.
“This recognition is reinforced by growing evidence that healthy ecosystems are critical to achieving a broad range of sustainable development goals (SDGs): climate resilience, food security, water provision and human health,” it added.
Noting that operationalising a nexus approach requires considerable thought, the report highlighted the Satoyama initiative in sacred grove restoration in South India’s Kalrayan Hills, implemented by the Vellore Institute of Technology with support from the Satoyama Development Mechanism Fund.
The Satoyama initiative is a global effort to realise “societies in harmony with nature” through the promotion of socioecological production landscapes and seascapes (SEPLS), where biodiversity conservation and human livelihoods are interconnected.
The initiative is based on using model landscapes traditionally shaped through the synergistic practice of sustainable agriculture, forestry and fisheries, mainly in rural communities.
The report also cited the example of the National Mission for a Green India, one of eight critical missions under India’s National Action Plan on Climate Change (NAPCC) – which integrates forest restoration into rural development, energy and water programmes.
However, the report acknowledged that developing economies in the Asia-Pacific region face a climate financing gap of approximately $800 billion annually.
It mentioned that closing this gap requires finance structured to deliver co-benefits across climate, biodiversity and pollution objectives, and a concerted effort to make fragmented financing flows more coherent.
“Finance-driven approaches rely on the structure of the financial mechanism itself, through its incentives or regulatory requirements, to actively generate co-benefits.
“In contrast, finance-enabling approaches depend on well-designed projects to deliver these benefits, with finance playing a supportive rather than a driving role,” said one of the key messages in the report.
It added that synergistic financing can increase transaction costs, extend preparation timelines and create coordination challenges, but noted that these trade-offs can be addressed through regulatory reforms, cost reductions and payment-for-performance structures that align incentives.
“Well-designed public, private and blended finance mechanisms can generate synergistic outcomes. However, these instruments often remain underutilised due to fragmented mandates, limited institutional capacity and weak market incentives for integrated investment,” the report read.
Citing examples from Fiji, India, Indonesia and Vietnam, the report underscored that synergistic financing is feasible when trade-offs are understood and managed.
It said that experiences from these countries show that pipelines of investable, synergistic projects exist, and that there is a need to strengthen enabling environments, voluntary frameworks, and financial ecosystems to enable the private sector to invest in that pipeline.
“The case studies demonstrate that challenges to synergistic finance can be managed through greater attention to regulatory clarity, cost reductions, payment-for-performance structures that align incentives and existing partnerships that remove coordination constraints,” the report said.
It also mentioned India’s Super-Efficient Energy Equipment Programme (SEEP) to highlight how payment-for-performance financing can catalyse multidimensional synergies, and the Tamil Nadu Biodiversity Conservation project to show how Official Development Assistance (ODA) financing can enable integrated conservation-livelihood models through adaptive design and multi-stakeholder coordination.
In its recommendation to national governments, the report highlighted the need to operationalise inter-ministerial coordination through secretariats empowered to review public investments against climate, biodiversity, and pollution criteria, and to design integrated financial systems and regulatory frameworks for planning with co-benefits.
It also called for repurposing subsidies misaligned with climate goals toward multi-benefit environmental investments, and formulating comprehensive national strategies that quantify total financing requirements across environmental domains while explicitly identifying synergies and trade-offs.