Author: Dafydd Elis

On Wednesday at COP15, a side event packed with high-profile representatives of intergovernmental agencies and national governments discussed the prospects for technology transfer over the coming decades.

The session was opened by the chair, UN-DESA’s Sha Zukang. He outlined a vision for technology transfer in three parts.

The issues

First, he said, technology transfer arrangements should adhere to four principles: timeliness (we need to use technologies that are available now, and we must accelerate their diffusion); equity (technology can contribute to inequality if legal or economic barriers prevent it from being used by poor nations); transparency (opacity will only slow the process); and safety (all technologies entail risks and these will need to managed as we move ahead).

Second, he pointed to the Marshall Plan, the Green Revolution and the child immunisation programme as programmes that succeeded because they were underpinned by good strategies. He called for a similarly strategic, integrated, approach to technology transfer in order to achieve the same effect.

Third, he called for the technology transfer debate to be specific: focussing on the critical sectors of renewable energy, energy efficiency, forests and food & agriculture.

The approach

Jairam Ramesh, India’s Minister of Environment and Forests, then shared his thoughts on the important issues in the technology transfer debate. He argued that the architecture for technology transfer will need to include a diversity of approaches for different contexts. This could include both publicly financed initiatives, public-private initiatives or new frameworks. He also suggested that some kind of change would be required to Intellectual Property regimes, perhaps along the lines of the amendments made to the WTO’s TRIPS to allow the use of generic drugs for AIDS, malaria and TB. Finally, he underlined the importance of capacity building, and enhancing developing countries’ ability to absorb and use new climate technologies.

The organisations

The rest of the speakers at the event represented intergovernmental organisations - UNEP, UNDP, UNIDO, IRENA, GEF and WIPO. They outlined the work that the UN is doing in energy: a discussion that made it clear that across the UN agencies working in this area there is an awareness of the interaction between social and economic issues and the climate change agenda - particularly the ‘bottom billion’ who do not have any access to electricity. While there are tensions between the agenda of poverty alleviation and reducing emissions, a few of the commentators expressed optimism about the opportunities to combine strategies to provide access to energy and simultaneously move developing countries’ development to a low-carbon pathway.

The presentations from GEF and IRENA highlighted the action that is already under way to develop and implement technology transfer initiatives. The GEF’s work in developing the Poznań Strategic Program on Technology Transfer has already resulted in funding being made available to develop national Technology Needs Assessment for developing countries and a number of technology transfer initiatives. IRENA, a new organisation dedicated to renewable energy, will be working on providing support to developing countries as they seek to increase their share of energy delivered from renewable sources.

Side events at COP15 don’t directly contribute to the negotiation of a new treaty on climate change. But they often provide an opportunity to look beneath the language of negotiating texts and think about the challenges of turning the words on paper into action on the ground. Whatever agreement is eventually reached by national leaders through the UNFCCC, the challenge of implementation will be even greater than the challenge of reaching agreement in the first place.

Even while the climate deal is hanging in the balance, then, it’s good to know that the institutional architecture for technology transfer is already beginning to take shape.

Author: Dafydd Elis

Windmills located between Malmo and Copenhagen (Image by: nosha)

It’s crunch time in Copenhagen: the governmental leaders are here and they will have to find an agreement during the next two days if they are to leave with their credibility intact. Having now seen two official drafts of the text being discussed by AWG-LCA, it’s possible to glean some insights into the direction in which negotiations over technology transfer are moving.

Technology transfer is one of the five negotiating themes that have been under negotiation for the last two years as part of the Bali Road Map. There are two key questions surrounding technology transfer. The first is architecture: what institutional framework will be in place after 2012 to govern technology transfer activity? The second is financing: how much money will be available for technology transfer and who will decide where this money is spent?

In the period leading to COP15, the Contact Group on Enhanced Action on Development and Transfer of Technology debated a range of possibilities for both these issues.

On architecture, there is broad consensus that some kind of central entity will be required - perhaps an Executive Board for Technology - that would play a coordinating role in the new technology transfer arrangements. There is also a good level of support for technology-specific and regionally-specific co-ordination and planning.

But there were also a number of areas of disagreement between the negotiating blocks, particularly on the issue of funding. Not all the negotiating groups agreed that a specific financing fund for technology transfer would be required, or what form that fund should take. The question of intellectual property rights has also created divisions across the board.

The first official draft text produced during COP15, which was issued last Friday, did little more than to formally articulate these areas of agreement and disagreement. It proposed an Executive Body on Technology or a Technology Action Committee with overall responsibility for accelerating the development and transfer of climate-related technologies. This would be accompanied by a Consultative Network for Climate Technology, supported by regional technology centres, to provide technical assistance to developing countries

On finance, Friday’s text left all the options - including a separate mechanism for technology transfer - on the table. Given the sensitivity of the financing issue this wasn’t surprising.

Today’s new draft text reflects progress in the negotiations over an institutional framework. In what appears at the surface to be a classic semantic compromise, the two competing options of an Executive Body or an Action Committee have been amalgamated into a ‘Technology Executive Committee’.

Behind these semantic changes in the high-level text, there lies a considerable amount of detail, which is elaborated in one of the draft Addenda published yesterday by the AWG-LCA. The addendum proposes that the Technology Executive Committee will be responsible for directing technology transfer activities (including developing technology road maps, performing policy analysis, and developing criteria for financial support capacity building), while the Technology Network will be used to deliver the support and advise developing countries on their use and development of new technologies.

There are a number of square brackets in the text, and the section on intellectual property rights is particularly heavily punctuated with the all-too-familiar [s and ]s. And the financing arrangements still appear decidedly unclear: the draft high-level text contains proposals for Finance Board, a Finance Fund, a Finance Facility, as well as a review or reform of the GEF.

Today’s fundamental disagreements over the content of the draft texts shows that nothing is certain in these negotiations, so any or all of these proposals may of course change over the remainder of COP15. But it appears that some form of agreement is solidifying over technology transfer: of all the issues on the table, it is perhaps the one that looks most hopeful.

Author: Dafydd Elis

Steven Chu in Copenhagen (Image by: Andy Revkin)

The US’s Energy Secretary Steven Chu announced a new stream of funding for low-energy technologies here in Copenhagen yesterday.

The money is being offered as the result of discussions at the Major Economies Forum (MEF) at L’Aquila, Italy, earlier this year.

The money is for five years, and will be distributed over four different programmes. One will focus on solar-powered lighting using LEDs; another will provide practical and economic support to low-income countries to deploy renewable energy technologies. The other two programmes focus on improving energy efficiency in developed countries’ products and on providing information about clean technology potential globally.

Of these, the bulk of the funding will go to the renewable energy funding - $250m of the $350m announced. In fact, much of this money is not new. $200m of it had already been pledged by the United Kingdom, Netherlands, Norway and Switzerland.

While this funding might go a little way to filling a near-term gap in financing for technology transfer and development, the short five-year duration of the programme announced and the relatively small sums involved ($70m a year between more than seven major economies) is small fry even compared to the $10billion per year committed by the EU to adaptation funding last week.

More fundamentally, a long-term and economically sizable mechanism for supporting technology transfer will need to be developed as part of a post-Kyoto agreement. This has been under discussion over the last two years as part of the Bali agreement, and featured in the draft negotiation text issued last week.

Exactly how this will look once this week’s negotiations are done remains to be seen.