Image Courtesy: Sustainable Business Consulting
In parallel to the Barcelona international climate talks last week, a report on one of the major issues under discussion, green technology, was launched in Delhi. Entitled “A Policy Approach for Supporting Clean Energy Technology in India,” and produced by the Coalition for Innovation, Employment and Development (CIED), the report finds that developing and deploying advanced clean technologies, including biofuels, hydro, wind, and nuclear, could create almost 10 million jobs in India by 2025.
However, in order to capture this opportunity, the report states that removing Intellectual Property Rights (or IPRs), which are the fees charged by the innovator of a particular technology for purchasing their invention, would be a bad move, slowing down technology developments, and that, conversely, they must be strengthened.
A variety of forms of compulsory licensing, which is the granting of licenses by governments to circumvent international property costs, have been called for to broaden access to technologies for public purposes by developing nations in the climate talks. But Pawan Chopra, Director of Dua Consulting, and a lead author of the study, said this “is a red herring” at the report’s launch in Delhi, adding that “in the real world, people only develop technology for profit.”
The CIED report proffers that efforts, such as compulsory licensing, to avoid IPRs, would actually discourage innovators from sharing technologies with India and other developing countries. “Intellectual property will be the catalyst for cleantech innovation and deployment in India,” says the report, adding that it will pull in billions of dollars worth of private capital, which would translate into additional jobs.
In addition to enforcing and strengthening IPRs, the authors state that policies to reduce barriers to market access are also needed in India. These would include the provision of lower tariffs for clean technology, reduced time for patent awards on environmental technologies, and tax incentives for clean technologies.
However, recommendations to strengthen IPRs for green technologies, in particular, come in marked contrast to the position of many developing countries in the international climate talks that calls for the costs of green technology IPRs to be lowered or fully covered by a global regime.
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