As a deadly heatwave engulfed Europe, the first question to pop up in my mind was "It's a rather cold area where Air Conditioning is rare, how will Europeans cope with the heatwave?". This article from TIME discusses this subject from UK's perspective.
Less than 5% of homes in the UK are air-conditioned. Because of the old age of most homes in the UK, retrofitting these houses for AC is a hard task. Moreover, ACs will only provide temporary relief from a heatwave, as in the long run, it will significantly add to the carbon emissions and exacerbate the heat.
Air-conditioning systems pump out carbon emissions that contribute to climate change, while the production of new units requires the environmentally destructive extraction of rare metals. To achieve its target of net zero, the U.K. government should, according to Mordak, be reconfiguring buildings and cities to promote “passive” methods of cooling—insulation, shading and tree planting—rather than energy-guzzling cooling systems.
You can read the article here.
What we need is not air conditioning but designing the built environment to capture less heat. The urban heat island effect is a classic example of the built environment capturing more heat than required, and contributing to the heatwaves.
In the UHI, buildings, artificial surfaces and other materials absorb heat due to their absorbance being higher than natural surfaces like stone or mud. These materials such as concrete, metal and glass then release the heat back into the environment during the night and create an island of heat where there is high density of these materials such as in cities.
We don't need to retrofit these buildings with new air conditioning systems. We need to rebuild cities from scratch to be as nature based as possible.