Rich countries, led by the US, have opposed discussing proposals from various poor countries around the reform of intellectual property rights (IPR). These discussions are crucial to technology transfer efforts. This document is quite useful as a primer on IPR and climate change.Technology transfer (as I’ve written before) will be crucial for helping poor countries develop clean technologies. However, current IPR regimes are quite restrictive, and much IP is owned by private companies who don’t want to give it away for free.

This isn’t the first time these issues have come up in a global social justice context. A few years ago there was uproar when big pharma tried to stop generic drugs companies copying their HIV/AIDS treatments and selling them at prices which poor people in developing countries could afford.

G77+ China have been arguing that rich nations should buy cleantech IPR from private companies in their countries and make it available to all, in the name of climate justice. This move would also prevent those companies from making huge profits out of the necessity of the world moving towards less carbon-intensive growth.

It is essentially another row about market-based mechanisms – countries like India are arguing that the market can’t be trusted to provide a consistent flow of technologies, which is fair enough. Of course, there is another side to the argument. It would be very difficult to change the IP regime to accommodate free transfer of clan technologies – the whole thing could need to be rewritten.

Furthermore, it would remove the profit motive for companies to develop the technology in the first place. Therefore, rich countries are sceptical because if the idea was put in place it would essentially involve them massively subsidising green industry, distorting markets, and generally holding back the “invisible hand” that is supposedly going to solve all our climate problems.

In any case, there has to be a way around this issue that lets technology transfer happen in both a fast and fair way. Just don’t expect rich countries to budget on IPR reform…

An interesting study from CERNA came out recently. Researchers from the team working on Technology Transfer and Climate Change (linked to the OECD) were looking at climate-related technology innovations over 25 years.

They found that Kyoto has accelerated their development, but that there is little evidence of the transfer of these clean technologies from the developed to the developing world. Based on patents taken out between the late 70s and 2003, they look at renewable energy technologies, as well as various other “cleantech” innovations, such as energy conservation in buildings, energy-efficient lighting and CCS.

The Kyoto link is that whilst innovation in all technologies (climate-related and otherwise) was growing at the same pace until the mid-nineties, climate change technologies are now apparently developing much faster. Furthermore, in Annex 1 nations, innovation in climate mitigation technologies has been growing at 9% per year on average between 1998 and 2003. However, no growth rate was observed in the US and Australia.

They measured tech transfer by looking at the share of inventions that are patented in other countries beyond the country of origin. Only 18% of clean-tech patents were extended beyond developed countries to developing countries. Indeed, three-quarters of the innovation transfers from one country to another were among developed countries.

Clearly this is not good news for adaptation. For developing countries, mitigation and adaptation will go hand in hand in the long term. If tech transfer is not happening fast enough, they will not be able to benefit from the technologies that will help them achieve low-carbon growth. There needs to be more effort from developed countries to ensure that advances in technology are shared globally, on a greater scale, and faster.