International Intellectual Property Rights Project

Massive public and private investment will be needed on a global scale to address climate change. Technology transfer was recognized in the Kyoto Protocol as an essential tool for getting clean technologies deployed in the developing world. Article 4.5 of the Protocol requires developed countries to promote, facilitate, and finance technology transfer to developing countries and to "...support the development and enhancement of endogenous capacities and technologies of developing country Parties." Article 4.7 puts this support into wider context, linking financial support and technology transfer to developing countries to their broader economic and social development. This support will be essential in enabling developing countries to achieve low carbon pathways to economic growth, but today's technologies will not themselves be enough to meet the climate change challenge. Continuous innovation will be necessary to evolve newer technologies capable of achieving lower emissions at lower cost. This will require massive investment - perhaps as much as USD 550 billion in annual worldwide investments through to 2030 and up to USD 45 trillion between now and 2050. The challenge will be to achieve the necessary investment levels to do both of these together - deployment of low carbon technology in the developing world as well as continuous innovation in new technologies on a global scale. The private commercial and financial sectors will be the main source of investment in new technologies and the required infrastructure needed to meet these extraordinary needs and must be given the right regulatory framework to incentivize this massive investment.

One goal of NPF's GIPC project is to contribute to an international policy consensus on intellectual property rights and their influence on the public interest, innovation, and technology transfer of "green" technologies as reflected in international treaties with respect to the innovation lifecycle for critical energy, environmental adaptation and mitigation technologies. International norms regarding intellectual property rights, including interpretations that should be given existing treaty obligations under Article 31 of the TRIPS Agreement relating to compulsory licensing, are currently under debate in several United Nations specialized agencies including, World Health Organization, World Trade Organization, World Intellectual Property Organization, World Meteorological Organization, and the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). NPF sponsored three white papers (see the Publications section of our website) constituting a systematic review of the body of economics literature that explore the role of intellectual property rights in innovation, financing and investment decision-making, and dissemination of green technology projects.  We employed the NPF/ISPA approach of developing criteria for the inclusion/exclusion of published studies in these reviews and the reviews were undertaken by an independent team of academic economists and reviewers.  We emphasized criteria that selected papers that included topics where there is a significant public interest character to the technologies of concern to the international community.

The grantor was the Global Intellectual Property Center of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Terms of Reference for the project established strict firewalls between the research team and the funders to preserve the integrity of the work product.  Follow-on projects will soon be looking at how to develop policy constructs that provide practical solutions to help the developing world adopt cleaner power and other technologies that will help protect the global environment without restricting essential economic development.

In a related effort, NPF is working to help establish an international policy consensus on the role of normative market mechanisms to facilitate investment in developing and vulnerable economies so that these nations can achieve access to needed technologies and infrastructure.  NPF is also working with national and international negotiators to the UNFCCC to implement NPF's High Integrity Policymaking methodologies to help improve negotiator access to high-quality information in this very complex and controversial area.