By Abiodun Salako
Food is the world’s most essential resource, yet approximately 13.2% of it is lost annually between harvest and retail. According to the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), this loss, totalling over USD 400 billion, occurs during transport, storage, and processing. In developed countries, the conversation often centres on retail and consumer waste. In lower-income regions, however, a more fundamental cause of food loss is the inability of farmers to store produce. Across sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, South-East Asia, and small island developing states in the Caribbean, farmers are increasing productivity only to see that success evaporate in the heat. The absence of affordable, energy-efficient, solar-powered cold storage is a structural barrier to food security, farmer incomes, and climate resilience, and scaling it must be a priority.
Climate change, energy, and agricultural resilience
The cold storage deficit is, at its core, a climate problem. Food loss and waste account for 8–10% of global greenhouse gas emissions (IPCC, 2019). This is roughly five times the emissions of the aviation sector, based on comparative estimates from UN climate analyses. When produce rots for want of refrigeration, every unit of land, water, fertiliser, and labour embedded in its production is wasted too. Reducing post-harvest losses is therefore a powerful mitigation lever, not only an agricultural one.
Rising temperatures are actively deepening the challenge. Higher seasonal temperatures, extreme heat events, and droughts make it more challenging to store, process, transport, and sell food safely, often leading to a significant volume of food being wasted or lost (UNEP, 2024). In sub-Saharan Africa, 96% of food loss occurs post-harvest rather than through consumer waste. In Asia, over 40% of food loss occurs along commodity supply chains between harvest and the consumer. Kenya alone loses approximately USD 578 million annually to post-harvest losses in fruits, vegetables, and fish, a pattern also experienced across the Caribbean, where small island states face compounding pressure from climate vulnerability and limited cold-chain capacity.
Many of the most affected regions also face persistent energy challenges that make conventional, grid-dependent cold storage largely unviable. Power is unreliable, unaffordable, or both. Solar-powered, energy-efficient storage offers a credible alternative: cutting electricity costs and emissions in line with the Paris Agreement, while allowing farmers to store produce longer and sell at better prices, particularly where price volatility and spoilage routinely devastate smallholder revenues. The urgency of this is not lost upon the climate finance community. Principal consultant, Marion Denantes, puts it thus; ‘’Multilateral Climate Funds like the GCF have already approved several projects that incorporate energy-efficient and renewable-powered cold storage. These interventions are highly prioritised because they directly tackle post-harvest food losses, enhance value chains, and build agricultural resilience against rising temperatures and climate shocks, while simultaneously delivering mitigation co-benefits by reducing energy consumption and food waste emissions.’’
Where is the funding and is it enough?
Within climate-resilient value chain programmes, multilateral development banks and climate funds are highly positioning cold chain infrastructure within climate-resilient value chain programmes. The African Development Bank approved, in October 2021, a USD 10 million equity stake in the ARCH Cold Chain Solutions East Africa Fund to develop cold storage operations across Kenya, Tanzania, Ethiopia, Uganda, and Rwanda. The Green Climate Fund (GCF) has approved several projects incorporating energy-efficient and renewable-powered cold storage. For instance, the FP286 (Multi-Country Solid Waste and Sustainable Agriculture Facility) project promotes solar-powered cold storage and low-carbon cooling to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from food waste decomposition was approved in 2025. The FP283 (Glaciers to Farms, Central and West Asia) operates across nine countries, targeting cold storage upgrades to address 30–50% post-harvest losses in Pakistan and Uzbekistan, approved in 2025. And the FP257 (RE-GAIN, Seven African Countries), approved in 2025, equips storage and processing facilities with solar PV to meet rising energy demands driven by increasing temperatures. Together, these programmes show an appetite for scaling renewable-powered cold chain solutions. Meanwhile, In 2025, the GEF Small Grants Programme inaugurated a 26-kilowatt solar-powered cold storage facility in Sagbokoji, a remote fishing community in Lagos State, Nigeria. But these investments remain a fraction of what is required. Transitioning to nature-positive agriculture, of which cold chain infrastructure is a critical component, is estimated to require between USD 200 billion and USD 450 billion annually over the next decade. The money and the mandate exist. The gap lies in targeting and delivery mechanisms.
Why cold storage remains underfunded
If the technology is proven and the need acute, why has scaling proved so elusive? Several structural barriers explain the shortfall. Cold storage sits at the intersection of agriculture, energy efficiency, and climate adaptation, but most MDB and climate fund windows are organised around discrete sectors. Without a natural institutional home, it consistently falls between mandates. Returns are also difficult to model. Cold storage prevents losses rather than generating new revenue. Most climate finance instruments are structured around measurable financial returns; avoided losses, the core value proposition, are harder to verify and harder to sell to an investment committee.
Individual units serving smallholder farmers rarely meet the minimum ticket sizes MDBs require. Without aggregation mechanisms that bundle projects into investable portfolios, they are simply passed over. Perceived risk around smallholder-linked infrastructure further deters private capital, while public finance has not stepped in sufficiently to compensate.
Opening up finance for cold storage
Mobilising climate finance for cold storage requires the ability to translate a practical infrastructure need into a credible theory of change, navigate the mandates of multilateral funds, and structure financing instruments that attract private capital while protecting the communities most at risk. That is the work E Co. does. Agriculture is a focus area of our climate finance practice because food systems are simultaneously a mitigation opportunity, an adaptation imperative, and a livelihood issue for the world’s most vulnerable communities. We have a proven track record supporting GEF and GCF-funded projects spanning nature, agriculture, and food systems across some of the world’s most challenging geographies. The implications for project design are practical and precise. Marion Denantes, Principal consultant at E Co. notes: “When designing a GCF project involving cold storage, it should be positioned within the Agriculture and Food Security results area. As demonstrated in approved proposals, explicitly calculate both the adaptation benefits such as increased shelf life, stabilised food supplies, higher farmer incomes and the mitigation co-benefits, including displaced diesel usage and avoided methane emissions from rotting food. Combining cold storage with digital logistics or aggregator platforms further strengthens the paradigm-shifting potential of the intervention.”
Conclusion
A food-secure world is not built only in the field but in the supply chain, which is the infrastructure that keeps what farmers grow edible long enough to reach the people who need it. Scaling energy-efficient cold storage sits at the intersection of food security, climate adaptation, smallholder livelihoods, gender equity, and clean energy deployment. As we look toward the 2030 targets, with the global population projected to rise from the current 8.2 billion to nearly 9.7 billion by 2050, achieving a food-secure world is paramount. This objective, which is ensuring that present and future populations have access to enough nutritious food, demands coordinated efforts and innovative approaches to enhance the sustainability and resilience of agrifood systems, particularly in developing countries in the Global South.
