Culver, Keith --- "Low carbon futures for all? Strategic options for global availability of environmental technologies" [2013] ELECD 718; in Brown, E.L. Abbe (ed), "Environmental Technologies, Intellectual Property and Climate Change" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2013) 29

Book Title: Environmental Technologies, Intellectual Property and Climate Change

Editor(s): Brown, E.L. Abbe

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9780857934178

Section: Chapter 1

Section Title: Low carbon futures for all? Strategic options for global availability of environmental technologies

Author(s): Culver, Keith

Number of pages: 30

Abstract/Description:

What role can IP rights play in securing equitable global access to essential technologies for response to the challenge of climate change? This chapter explores the geopolitical context of this question, and argues that the question is at best misplaced, and at worst, a costly red herring. This chapter argues that where the need and opportunity are greatest for climate change mitigation and adaptation, the technologies needed are not essential technologies, and further, the relevant non-essential technologies are most useful if they arrive in the company of supporting institutions and practices. If this argument is sound, it points the way to a global strategy for equitable technology access and implementation in which IP rights play a relatively small role. In this strategy, support for equitable access to needed climate change technologies and implementation techniques is not gained by IP-handling tactics. Rather, appropriate support is supplied by enabling countries in greatest need of climate technologies to access finance and technical knowhow for implementation of integrated suites of technologies and implementation practices – some existing and some new. This argument will be supported by a reflection on the present and future context of climate change mitigation and adaptation, a context in which the increasingly urban global population is distributed in significantly asymmetric urban environments: the slow-growing, rapidly decarbonizing, relatively wealthy and relatively old cities of the global North, and the fast-growing, high-carbon, relatively poor and relatively new cities of the global South.