Study Shows Climate Change Innovation Concentrated In Few Nations

The adoption of 1997 landmark environmental agreement the Kyoto Protocol caused a surge in environmental innovation, but the countries which are innovating and the licensees of this technology are limited, finds a newly released study making use of patent data to track where technological responses to climate change are coming from as well as the licensing practices of the technology owners.

“Far from being a drag on economies and innovation, international efforts to combat climate change have sparked technological creativity,” said Achim Steiner, executive director of the UN Environment Programme said in a press release [pdf]. “The challenge now is to find ways in which these advances can be diffused, spread and transferred everywhere.”

Over 80 percent of all clean energy innovations originate from just six countries – Japan, the United States, Germany, Korea, France and the United Kingdom – the study found. A licensing survey conducted simultaneously found that licences were only rarely going to developing countries, and those were primarily going to Brazil, China and India.

The study, “Patents and clean energy: bridging the gap between evidence and policy” is a project of the European Patent Office (EPO), the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and the International Centre for Trade and Sustainable Development (ICTSD) intending to provide empirical evidence and analysis related to climate change technology by examining some 400,000 clean energy related patents.

The study was launched today at an event in Brussels. It is available in full here [pdf], and a summary of the report is available here [pdf].

Intellectual Property Watch‘s previous reporting on this study from 13 July is available here.