It is a foregone conclusion that the manufacturing process of cement adds 5% of the annual anthropogenic global carbon footprint. Researchers have extensively used different types of mineral admixture include ground granulated blast slag, silica fume, metakaolin and fly ash in concrete to reduce the carbon footprints. This study used the sugar cane bagasse ash (SCBA) and silica fume (SF), a mineral admixture as partial replacements for cement, thereby resulting in the formulation of ternary blended concrete. The replacement of SF was maintained at a constant percentage of 10%, and the percentage of SCBA was varied between 0 and 30%, with an increment of 5%. The concrete cubes were prepared with different proportions of SCBA along with 10% of SF and exposed to elevated temperatures 200, 300, 500 and 700 °C and cooled using two cooling regimes, viz. water and air cooling. It was noticed that SCBA15SF10 TBC replacement of OPC had shown better performance at all temperatures when subjected to both air and water cooling. © 2021, The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.