Mobilizing Investment in Refrigerant Decarbonization

By Luke Pritchard

Refrigerants account for an estimated 3–4% of global greenhouse gas emissions, but they remain one of the most significant and under-addressed opportunities for climate action. As demand for cooling continues to rise across commercial buildings, industrial processes, and digital infrastructure, the climate impact of refrigerants is already growing. Yet refrigerants don’t fit neatly into traditional emissions categories. Responsibility is often shared across manufacturers, service providers, building operators, and tenants, making it difficult for any one actor to take ownership. As a result, refrigerants have become a persistent blind spot for companies, even as they face increasing pressure to address Scope 3 emissions.

This challenge is particularly acute in the built environment. Commercial office spaces and data centers, both rapidly expanding and increasingly essential to the global economy, depend on complex cooling systems that often use high-global-warming-potential (GWP) refrigerants. While many companies have made meaningful progress in addressing emissions from their own operations, they lack clear ways to influence or invest in reducing emissions from refrigerant systems embedded across their wider value chains. Without targeted action, refrigerant emissions will continue to grow alongside demand for cooling.

At the same time, solutions are advancing rapidly. Lower-GWP refrigerants, improved system design, better leak detection and prevention technologies, stronger recovery and reuse practices, and lifecycle refrigerant management approaches all offer pathways to materially reduce emissions. However, many of these solutions face familiar barriers, including fragmented value chains, uneven demand signals, and limited mechanisms to channel corporate investment at scale.

To help address this, Beyond is partnering with êffecterra to identify and mobilize high-impact investment opportunities to reduce Scope 3 refrigerant emissions. A key first step is a better understanding of which solutions are ready to deploy today, and where there is potential to scale. 

Through our new Request for Information (RFI), we are mapping the full landscape of available solutions, from near-term deployable interventions to innovative pilot concepts capable of unlocking new models of emissions reduction. Insights gathered will help us shape a pipeline of investment opportunities for Beyond Alliance members over the next 12-18 months, designed to connect corporate demand with credible, high-impact outcomes.

We are particularly interested in hearing from solution providers that can deliver integrated approaches to reducing refrigerant emissions and lifecycle management within the built environment, especially in commercial office spaces and data centers. This includes solutions that address refrigerant transition as well as system optimization, leakage reduction, recovery, reuse, and end-of-life management.

Beyond brings together leading companies committed to tackling Scope 3 emissions. By aggregating demand and working alongside solution providers and market experts, this initiative aims to unlock a new frontier of climate action that has remained largely out of reach until now.

Responses must be submitted using the form linked below. The deadline for submissions is May 11, 2026

Request for Information overview

Request for Information form