Refrigerant Leakage in Asia: How Businesses Can Measure and Cut Cooling Emissions

Refrigerant Leakage in Asia: How Businesses Can Measure and Cut Cooling Emissions

A business may spend heavily on efficient chillers, optimise air-conditioning schedules and reduce electricity consumption, yet still overlook another source of cooling-related greenhouse-gas emissions: refrigerant escaping from the equipment itself.

This distinction matters particularly for businesses operating hotels, shopping centres, factories, supermarkets, hospitals, warehouses, cold-chain facilities and commercial buildings across Asia. Refrigeration and air-conditioning systems can affect emissions through both the electricity required to operate them and the refrigerants contained inside them.

Treating those two sources as one number makes performance harder to understand. A company can reduce electricity consumption while refrigerant losses increase. It can also replace older refrigerants while failing to fix recurring leaks. Credible cooling decarbonisation therefore requires businesses to measure energy and refrigerant performance separately before bringing them together.

Why Refrigerant Emissions Deserve More Attention

Cooling is becoming increasingly important to energy and climate strategy. UNEP’s Global Cooling Watch 2025 warns that cooling demand could more than triple by 2050 under a business-as-usual pathway. The International Energy Agency has also identified growing air-conditioning ownership as an important contributor to electricity demand, particularly in emerging and developing economies.

The environmental impact comes through two principal channels.

• Indirect emissions arise from electricity used by chillers, compressors, fans, pumps and other cooling equipment.
• Direct emissions can arise when refrigerants escape during operation, servicing, installation or equipment retirement.

These issues require different evidence. Electricity consumption can normally be traced through meters, utility bills or building-management systems. Refrigerant emissions depend on information such as refrigerant type, equipment charge, cylinders purchased, quantities added during servicing, recovered refrigerant and changes to the equipment fleet.

That makes refrigerant management both an engineering issue and an ESG data issue.

The First Step: Build a Refrigerant Asset Register

A company cannot manage refrigerant leakage reliably if it does not know what equipment contains refrigerant.

A practical register should identify each significant refrigeration or air-conditioning asset and record at least:

• facility and equipment identification;
• equipment type;
• refrigerant type;
• designed refrigerant charge or capacity;
• commissioning date where available;
• service contractor;
• refrigerant added during maintenance;
• refrigerant recovered;
• leak repairs;
• equipment replacement or retirement; and
• supporting service documentation.

This sounds like ordinary maintenance administration, but it creates the foundation for defensible emissions accounting.

Many organisations instead hold the information across contractor invoices, handwritten maintenance reports, procurement records and individual facility spreadsheets. When the sustainability team asks how much refrigerant escaped during the year, nobody can reproduce the number confidently.

The solution is not necessarily sophisticated software. The priority is a consistent equipment identifier and a controlled process for capturing refrigerant movements.

Three Levels of Refrigerant Measurement

The most appropriate calculation approach depends on how significant refrigerant emissions are and how much operational information is available. The GHG Protocol provides dedicated guidance and calculation tools for refrigeration and air-conditioning equipment.

Measurement level	Typical approach	Suitable use	Main limitation
Screening	Estimate emissions using equipment capacity and assumed leakage factors	Determining whether refrigerants may be a material emissions source	Results depend heavily on assumptions
Service-record approach	Track refrigerant added during servicing together with installation and disposal information	Businesses with good maintenance records	Incomplete contractor records can weaken the calculation
Material balance	Reconcile refrigerant inventory, purchases, disposals and equipment-capacity changes	Larger portfolios requiring more robust accounting	Requires disciplined inventory control

The important principle is that an estimate should not automatically be presented as a precisely measured result. If a screening calculation relies on assumed leakage rates, the limitation should remain visible when the result is reported.

Measure the Refrigerant Before Converting It Into CO2e

One common reporting mistake is to focus immediately on tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent.

Operational management should start one step earlier.

For every relevant refrigerant, companies should first determine the physical quantity released or reasonably estimated to have been released. Only after that should the quantity be converted using the appropriate global warming potential required by the company’s chosen greenhouse-gas accounting framework.

This creates two useful performance indicators:

• physical leakage: kilograms of refrigerant lost; and
• climate impact: the resulting greenhouse-gas emissions expressed as CO2e.

Keeping both measures matters because a company changing refrigerant types could reduce climate impact even when the physical leakage rate has not improved. Conversely, switching refrigerants should not hide poor maintenance practices.

A Better KPI: Leakage Rate, Not Just Refrigerant Purchased

Total refrigerant purchased can be useful evidence, but it is not always a fair measure of operational performance. A business expanding from ten sites to twenty may purchase more refrigerant even though each system becomes more reliable.

A more useful operational indicator is a leakage rate based on refrigerant losses relative to the relevant equipment charge.

The denominator must remain consistent. Businesses should document whether the calculation covers total installed charge, average equipment charge during the reporting period or another defined basis.

The strongest dashboard therefore combines several indicators:

• kilograms of refrigerant lost;
• estimated CO2e from refrigerant emissions;
• leakage rate;
• number of significant leak incidents;
• repeat leaks on the same asset;
• refrigerant recovered during retirement;
• cooling electricity consumption; and
• cooling energy intensity where an appropriate operational denominator exists.

No single KPI tells the complete story.

The Cooling Evidence Chain

Companies can improve the credibility of their sustainability claims by establishing what Asia ESG calls a Cooling Evidence Chain:

1. Asset: identify the exact equipment containing refrigerant.
2. Movement: record every addition, recovery, transfer and disposal.
3. Event: connect abnormal additions to leaks, repairs or equipment changes.
4. Calculation: apply a documented and repeatable emissions method.
5. Verification: retain invoices, service records, cylinder records and relevant contractor evidence.
6. Performance: compare results against a consistent baseline and operational boundary.

This approach is particularly important for companies with facilities in several countries. Different contractors may describe refrigerants differently, use different service forms or maintain information for different periods. A group-level ESG number is only as reliable as those underlying records.

Do Not Confuse Refrigerant Replacement With Leakage Reduction

The global refrigerant landscape is changing under the Kigali Amendment to the Montreal Protocol, which establishes a phased reduction in the production and consumption of hydrofluorocarbons under differentiated national schedules.

For individual companies, however, moving to a lower-impact refrigerant and reducing leaks are separate achievements.

Consider two cooling systems. One uses a refrigerant with a higher climate impact but is maintained with very low leakage. Another uses a lower-impact refrigerant but repeatedly loses charge through poorly maintained equipment.

The second system may still have a lower refrigerant-related climate impact, but the recurring leakage remains an operational weakness.

A credible corporate strategy should therefore examine refrigerant selection, equipment design, leak prevention, servicing, recovery and energy efficiency together rather than relying on a refrigerant substitution alone.

Five Claims That Need Stronger Evidence

1. “We reduced cooling emissions.”

Specify whether the result refers to electricity-related emissions, refrigerant emissions or both.

2. “Our new cooling system is greener.”

Explain the measurable basis: lower electricity consumption, lower refrigerant climate impact, lower leakage, improved recovery or another demonstrated result.

3. “We eliminated refrigerant leakage.”

This is an absolute claim. It needs comprehensive evidence across the stated equipment and reporting period.

4. “Our refrigerant transition reduced emissions.”

Compare the relevant before-and-after climate impacts and define whether operating efficiency changed at the same time.

5. “Our cooling programme achieved a record result.”

A large improvement is not automatically a record. The achievement requires a clearly defined metric, comparison basis and evidence capable of supporting the claimed distinction.

From ESG Improvement to Exceptional Achievement

Most refrigerant-management improvements belong in normal operational performance programmes. Fixing leaks, maintaining equipment and keeping complete service records should not be presented as exceptional merely because the resulting figures look impressive.

Occasionally, however, an organisation may produce an unusually large and objectively measurable environmental result. The distinction between normal improvement and an exceptional achievement depends on whether the result is specific, measurable, comparable and independently verifiable.

For organisations considering formal record recognition in Asia, the official Asia Record application process requires applicants to define the proposed achievement, explain how it is measured and provide supporting evidence. An Asia record application is therefore separate from regulatory compliance, environmental certification or ordinary ESG reporting. Businesses exploring how to apply for Asia Record should establish the measurement boundary and evidence trail before making a record claim.

This same discipline is useful even when no record recognition is pursued. Evidence that can withstand independent scrutiny generally makes a sustainability claim more credible.

A 90-Day Refrigerant Measurement Plan

Period	Priority	Expected output
Days 1–30	Inventory refrigeration and air-conditioning assets	Equipment register with refrigerant type and charge information
Days 31–60	Collect service, purchase, recovery and disposal records	Traceable refrigerant movement dataset
Days 61–75	Select calculation method and establish baseline	Documented refrigerant emissions methodology
Days 76–90	Investigate major losses and introduce controls	Leak-reduction priorities, KPI owners and evidence requirements

Companies with hundreds of small split-unit air conditioners do not necessarily need to perfect every historical record before acting. They can prioritise large central systems, refrigeration plants, cold rooms and assets requiring repeated refrigerant top-ups while progressively improving the wider inventory.

What Good Refrigerant Management Ultimately Proves

The strongest cooling strategy does not depend on a single dramatic emissions number. It shows that the organisation understands what equipment it operates, what refrigerants it uses, where losses occur, how emissions are calculated and whether corrective action produces measurable improvement.

Cooling electricity should be measured. Refrigerant leakage should be measured. Equipment replacement should be documented. Changes in organisational or facility boundaries should be explained.

When these controls work together, businesses gain more than a stronger ESG disclosure. They gain an operational system capable of identifying recurring leaks, evaluating equipment decisions and separating genuine environmental performance from claims that cannot be substantiated.