Improved representation of urban processes in Earth System Models (ESMs) is a pressing need for climate modeling and climate-driven urban energy studies. Despite recent improvements to its fully coupled building energy model, the current Community Land Model Urban (CLMU) in the Community Earth System Model (CESM) lacks the infrastructure to model air-conditioning (AC) adoption explicitly. This undermines CESM’s fidelity in modeling urban climate and energy use, and limits its use in climate and energy risk assessments. Here, we establish an explicit-AC-adoption parameterization scheme in CESM that represents AC adoption explicitly through an AC adoption rate parameter in the Building Energy Model of CLMU, and build a present-day, global, survey-based, and spatially explicit AC adoption rate dataset at country and sub-country level that is integrated within CESM. The new dataset can be leveraged for other ESMs or global-scale models and analyses. The explicit AC adoption scheme and the AC adoption rate dataset significantly improve the accuracy of anthropogenic heat modeling due to AC in CESM. The new parameterization scheme makes it possible to evaluate the effects of changing AC adoption on global urban energy and climate using CESM. These developments enhance CESM in its use for climate impact assessments under future climate and socioeconomic development scenarios, and represent continued efforts in better representing urban processes and coupled human-urban-Earth dynamics in ESMs.