Lebanon’s Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) emphasise the recently published National Cooling Plan and states that fluorinated gases will be added to the NDC’s gas coverage once they have been included in Lebanon’s greenhouse gas inventory. Lebanon has an established National Cooling Plan, which highlights proposals for developing Minimum Energy Performance Standards (MEPS) and labelling regulations, a market study to better understand the country’s stock of appliances, a financing approach to support more energy efficient appliances, and a roadmap for the transition to carbon neutrality in the cooling sector by 2050. National efforts reinforce the National Cooling Plan and Lebanon’s NDC, including the second National Energy Efficiency Action Plan (2016-2020), which tackles the development of minimum energy performance standards and labelling for several equipment types, including cooling and heating systems.

The Lebanese air conditioning, commercial refrigeration, and refrigerants markets are import dominated. The national market consists primarily of companies that assemble the equipment parts and serve the domestic market. Although the market is dominated by high global warming potential refrigerants, some natural refrigerant solutions are currently used in central chillers.

Currently three financing programmes or facilities exist to fund green initiatives in Lebanon. These focus on private investment in renewables, energy efficiency initiatives, green buildings, and green technologies. Financial institutions are familiar with energy efficiency lending concepts, which could be translated to sustainable cooling solutions with support from Cool Up.