As Britain faces hotter summers and more frequent heatwaves, demand for cooling is rising rapidly. Yet a future built around millions of individual air conditioning units risks increasing electricity demand, placing greater strain on the grid, and adding more heat to our urban environments.

In Shared Thermal Infrastructure, Not Millions of Air Conditioners, we explore a different approach: treating cooling as shared infrastructure rather than a collection of individual appliances.

Drawing on global examples of district cooling, seasonal thermal storage, passive building design, and integrated thermal networks, the white paper argues that cooling can be delivered more efficiently, more sustainably, and at lower cost when planned at the scale of neighbourhoods, towns, and cities.

As the UK begins to adapt to a warming climate, the challenge is not simply how to cool more buildings, but whether we can build the thermal infrastructure needed to do so without creating new energy, carbon, and overheating problems in the process.