Technology Transfer

So we had our lecture today on technology transfer under the UNFCCC. A very basic overview of what technology transfer means, the instruments created under the Global Environment Facility. An almost heated exchange between an Indian Chevening fellow and the lecture over the corruption and undemocratic nature of the World Bank and the GEF. He made some valid points but went over the top since we all know that the World Bank and GEF have vested interests and the lecturer wasn't trying to defend them anyway. Then he went on to attack the entire Obama energy team saying they are all recycled people, which is not true because Steven Chu has never been involved in politics before.

One point that the lecture didn't cover in good detail was the complexity of the "environment" for promoting technology transfer. Western governments can't just turn on the technology transfer tap and, before you know it, developing countries have all the know-how they need for low carbon economies.

This is made clear in this report on tech transfer by a French think tank called CERNA. You can download it at

http://www.cerna.ensmp.fr/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=192&Itemid=288

Basically they've tried to analyse the extent of tech transfer from clean tech related patent filings all over the world. The gist is that clean tech patent filings have increased significantly since Kyoto, but technology has not necessarily been exported to developing countries. 75% of clean tech patents filed in 2 countries or more are still between developed countries only. Only 18% of patents exported have been north-south.

My understanding is that even if governments of developed countries want to transfer technology to developing countries, their hands are tied because the IP rights of technologies are mostly held by private actors who will only file patents, invest and commercialise technologies in another country if it's commercially feasible and profitable. So it's not a matter of western governments turning the "technology tap" on, so to speak.

Either governments have to offer carrots (low interest rates, funds) to clean tech companies to invest in developing countries, or create an attractive and profitable investment environment, something in the lines of the CDM (but much larger scale and more efficient) where proceeds from CERs can compensate for the initial capital outlay.

A possible solution was proposed by James Cameron in his talk on post-Kyoto, where he said clean tech investment would be much more efficiently implemented at the large scale we need, if the developed world embraced truly ambitious cuts e.g. 50% of 1990 levels by 2020, and scrap the additionality requirement in the CDM and scale up its administration to handle more applications. The huge cuts that are required means that there will be enormous demand for CERs, which will stimulate more and more large scale investments in the developing world at a scale we need to stabilise at 450ppm. Though environmental integrity will not be examined on a case by case scenario, the theory is that the attractive investment environment will create a scale so large that the carbon reductions more than compensates for the lack of the additionality requirement. This argument is very persuasive to me at the moment.