WIPOD – Page Points: Transcript of Episode 10

Intellectual Property and Green Technology

Shanar Tabrizi: Innovation is needed not only to develop, also to adapt them for local use. So one example is if you have developed a heat tolerant potato in one part of the world, it might not be directly applicable to another. So you need to continue that innovation journey to adapt that technology to a local context.

So a central theme of the Green Technology Book was also really the question of who can access these technologies?

Lise McLeod: It's not surprising that the global green technology market is expected to grow over the coming years. In fact, its growth is predicted at some 22% each year from now to the year 2030. This upcoming conversation covers our latest flagship publication, which aims to put innovation, green technology and intellectual property at the forefront in the fight against climate change.

Hello, Page Points listeners. Today I'm joined by two of my colleagues, Peter Oksen and Shanar Tabrizi, and they are the collaborators, authors, and most likely, many other titles in connection to our newest flagship publication, the Green Technology Book. Welcome to you both.

Peter Oksen: Thank you.

Shanar Tabrizi: Thank you, Lise. Pleasure to be here.

Lise McLeod: You both work in the same division. How about we begin by you telling us what is WIPO Green?

Peter Oksen: Thank you Lisa. So I'll start on that one. My name is Peter Oksen and we are both working in the WIPO Green, which is actually a very small part of WIPO. We are part of the Global Challenges Division, and basically what we do is that we are trying to be the major tool for what WIPO can do to contribute to the SDGs and especially the global challenges that we focus on. So basically we are kind of a forum where we support the output that comes from the national systems of innovation. So the national systems of innovation, they create a lot of technology, a lot of solutions, and we work on getting those solutions out there and being deployed as a fight against the global challenges of climate change and food security and the environment.

So we have an important part of our theory of change that is kind of the thinking behind what we are doing is that we believe that there is a lot of very serious problems that need to be addressed. There is also, we believe a lot of solutions to these problems. Innovation and technology provides a lot of these solutions, but we also can see that the deployment of these solutions doesn't go as fast as they have to in order to respond to the seriousness of the problems that we are facing.

We believe that one of the reasons that this is not going so fast and not so efficient is because there's a lack of knowledge and awareness of what actually are available, but also what these solutions can do both technically and economically. So that is one of the major things that we try to address in WIPO Green.

And as I said, we focus on the climate change, food security and environment. So it's pretty broad. Now unfortunately, the work that we are doing, the relevance of that is increasing all the time. As you know, climate change is not really going the right way. We are not very good at mitigating it or addressing climate change.

So unfortunately our work is getting more and more relevant and needed out there.

Lise McLeod: Peter, could you please provide us with an overview of the partnerships that you facilitate?

Peter Oksen: We work basically on making a contact between the ones that have the need and the ones that have the technology. Now we do that through four major areas.

So one is the database, so it is a large repository of needs and technologies, but also expert profiles and knowledge material, and we do projects on the ground, called acceleration projects. In these projects, we try to specifically try to identify needs in a certain region, in a certain country, on a certain subject area, and we try to identify the technologies that could be a solution for these specific needs.

So this is very much on the ground work. And presently we run six of these projects, four in Latin America, one in Indonesia, and one in China. And we have others in the planning also. Then we have a relatively large network, more than 150 partners, which are from multinational companies, small and medium scale companies, and government agencies, intellectual property offices and so on.

So very broad, and also NGOs. And then we produce some knowledge material, basically output of what we do in our projects and especially what we do in our database.

Lise McLeod: How did the idea of the book come about?

Peter Oksen: The Green Technology Book that we are talking about today is the latest edition to what we are producing as this knowledge material.

Basically what we want to do in the Green Technology Book is to raise the awareness that innovation and technology has a role to play in providing solutions to some of the big things. And the Green Technology Book is addressing green technology in general as a concept, but here in the first edition we made last year, we focus on climate change and we focus more specifically on adaptation technologies and climate change.

And why do we do that? Well, we do that because, first of all, it was the first edition and we needed to limit it to a specific area. The conference of the parties at COP last year in Egypt where we launched it, had a lot of focus on adaptation. It took place in Egypt, a part of Africa, and therefore that was quite high on the agenda.

And also because we feel that adaptation is not being addressed as much and certainly not the technologies that are available as, for example, mitigation. Which of course is not necessarily a problem because it's of course best to try to avoid the problem than trying to adapt through the consequences of it. But that's the main reasons that we focused on that and I think that both Shanar and I, who are the main forces behind this book, I think we're both quite thrilled to see all the innovation and all the technologies that are actually there.

So the Green Technology Book is a WIPO publication. It's not only WIPO Green, but we are the initiators for it, but it's actually based on a cooperation across WIPO and we partner also with two external organizations. One is the Climate Technology Center and Network, so this is part of the UNFCCC technology mechanism.

They're based in Copenhagen, and the other one is the Egyptian Academy of Scientific Research and Technology. So we are still working with those going forward in the next edition of the book, and it's a very good opportunity for us to continue and deepen our relation with these organizations, especially CTCN, who is an old partner of WIPO Green since the very beginning, but to concretize our cooperation into something very, very real.

Now, what we want to achieve with the Green Technology Book is we kind of think that there's a lot of innovation going on and there's a lot of messages coming out about new innovation and what it probably can do. So every day you will see, if you follow the media, you'll see new announcements. " This solution could change the game for this and this, and maybe in 30 years or 20 years or 10 years, we have a new solution to the energy crisis" or whatever. So there's a lot of hype in around this and one of the reasons that is that many of these companies, they're very fast in announcing a potential benefit from an innovation because that's how they attract investments also.

But it also confuses the picture a little bit. And we prefer that technology is seen as a real solution and not just something potentially in the future. And as I said in the beginning, we believe that there are a lot of solutions in there. So that was really the basic idea behind creating the Green Technology Book that we want to take a grounded and shall we say cool view of what is actually happening in various technological areas.

What is it technology can do in some of these areas? And preferably here and now, so we are not so interested in technologies that will come in 30 years time. We are interested in things that are basically proven already, which are very new on the market, but also the ones that are very close to come onto the market.

So again, it's a very practical approach to technology and therefore we also keep it very text light. This is not an academic type of publication. It is more like a mix between a catalogue of technologies and some technology trends, analysis and context descriptions around to describe how technology can be in a solution there.

But it's very text light and the focus is really on showing individual technologies that they are really there.

Lise McLeod: Why have you decided to publish the book and its information in different formats?

Peter Oksen: So to increase the reach, we made it as a digital first publication. I think it's the first of those in WIPO. And that means that it is from the beginning designed to be read online and also to be read on mobile phones. And we can see that a very large proportion, around 90% of our readers of the book or visitors to the site actually do it through mobile phones. And this also is because a big part of our readers are from developing countries on this first edition, and that has probably to do with that is about climate change adaptation. So it's digital first, but we also have a PDF version or a printed version, so that the ones who like to read publication like in the old fashioned way, you've got everything in one go, they can also download that.

And it has actually been downloaded, the whole report, more than 11,500 times since we launched it in November last year. And we have had more than half a million unique visitors of the book, so it has been quite well received in the public in general.

We also link it very closely to the database. So we have created a special collection in the database we have in WIPO Green. So the WIPO Green database is a free, UN-based open public database where everybody who has a green solution can upload it for free and we will then try to match it, or the program will automatically also match it for what is there.

Now we use the database as a backdrop for the Green Technology Book. This is where we store all the technologies that are there. And therefore we have this special collection in the database where we present them in a very nice way and where there is much more technologies than we actually have in the Green Technology Book itself.

So the Green Technology Book is like a snapshot of what we have found of interesting things. There are around 200 technologies in there. In the database we have 127,000 technologies. But of course, only a small part of those are relevant for this, but they are in the collection there. So it's very much a matter of trying to link it up to the resources that we have, and at the same time, getting it out there in a new way of publicizing it.

Lise McLeod: Who is the intended audience and how would you suggest that they consume the information?

Peter Oksen: So the target group, basically we are aiming to be a useful resource for everybody in the public who is facing challenges in relation to climate change. This is what we are dealing with here in the first edition.

So that means that it is targeting the general public. It is targeting people who are technology savvy to some degree, but not necessarily experts. So everybody can hopefully benefit and get inspired for what we show of technologies. And what we really want is that people who are in a municipality, a farmer or a fisherman, a city dweller, or somebody who is facing a problem in relation to climate change, that they see what is available and then contact the technologies in there.

So the publication is therefore action oriented. It's not just showing it. We are actually showing specific technologies, and when you found them in the technology book, there's a link that will bring you into the database. In the database you can read more about it, and there you can directly go to the webpage of the company that has the solution, and you can also click on a link to contact them directly.

Basically send them an email and get in contact with them. So this very action oriented way of doing it is the way that we hope that people will see that there are these solutions, take action and they can also contribute themselves. Because since the database is free for public upload, anybody who has a solution can upload it to the database and if it's relevant for the Green Technology Book, we will add it into the collection. And as such, it will be part of the whole setup around it.

Lise McLeod: Thank you, Peter. Shanar, how about if you could talk to us about how you chose the technology themes and about which ones you ended up choosing?

Shanar Tabrizi: Thank you for the question. I think the first thing to understand is that there's a massive funding gap when it comes to adaptation and responding to the impact from climate change today.

I think the estimated cost of adaptation per year is somewhere between 150 and 300 billion, so we really wanted to focus on the areas where innovation and technology are needed the most, and the heaviest chapter of the book relates to agriculture and forestry. Here we know that innovation and technology has a huge and important role for securing food security.

So in this chapter, we zero down on solutions to how to develop climate resilient crops, how to protect our crops and soils, how to bring water to the field in a more sustainable way. But we also look at more frontier and horizon and next generation digital farming technologies that can help farmers predict what will happen to the crops considering the weather changes.

And the second chapter we looked at was cities. Here we know that our cities are being impacted by more frequent and more intense heat waves, so we looked at technologies that respond to cooling needs and also solutions that can help protect lives and assets against floods and more extreme weather events.

The third chapter that we chose to look at is water and coastal zones. Water is very central when we talk about climate change and impact. We look at technologies here that can help us manage when there's either too little of the water. For example, solar powered plants that can turn seawater into drinking water, but also that can help us respond to when there's too much water.

Another example here is technologies that can divert flood water on the ground and save it for irrigation needs for when there's a drought. But in this water chapter, we also chose to look at how technology can play a role for protecting marine ecosystems in responding to climate challenges like acidification and warming temperatures.

But here we really saw that the potential role of technology is more limited compared to agriculture and cities, which really amplifies the message that we first and foremost must reduce emissions. We can't adapt our way out of the climate crisis in some areas. There's very little we can do with the help of climate technologies.

Lise McLeod: So looking at climate change and how technology can help us through this. How is innovation viewed as part of the solution? The book identifies some trends, so can you talk us through those as well?

Shanar Tabrizi: Absolutely. So we know that while you know, it's nowhere near the level of innovation we're seeing for technologies that can reduce greenhouse gas emissions, inventions and innovation related to adaptation technologies are increasing at about 6% per year.

And this is hugely important because we see every day new technologies being developed to help us respond to some of the main challenges that come from climate change, how we manage our water resources, or how we secure food security for the most vulnerable communities around the world. But innovation is needed not only to develop, also to adapt them for local use.

So one example is if you have developed a heat tolerant potato in one part of the world, it might not be directly applicable to another. So you need to continue that innovation journey to adapt that technology to a local context. So a central theme of the Green Technology Book was also really the question of who can access these technologies.

And when we talk about innovation, we often look at patent data. And here we can see that the adaptation technologies are mainly being invented in the global north and China, while they're mostly needed in the global south countries. So there's a discrepancy between where the technologies are developed and where they're needed the most.

And we also see that when it comes to transferring these innovations, there is less transfer between countries for adaptation technologies compared to technologies that reduce emissions. And most of this transfer is happening between high income countries. So here really, you know, international technology cooperation can play a huge role.

And interestingly recently, the term 'innovation cooperation' has been proposed as more of an alternative to classic 'technology transfer'. And it really indicates that technologies need to be co-developed and adapted to local contexts. And here governments and international institutions like WIPO can help create the enabling conditions for national systems of innovation. And this really includes, among other things, having well-managed intellectual property rights to protect the rights of inventors.

Lise McLeod: Excellent, thank you. The book as a resource is full of so many different technologies, like a big family of technologies. I know it's like we're not supposed to have a favorite child or anything like that, but do you have a favorite technology that made you, I don't know, inspire hope, or just something that really spoke to you?

Shanar Tabrizi: Do you wanna go first, Peter? Or I can go first. I mean, it's really difficult to choose from what we see as our babies in this book. And it's also important to note that not one technology can't respond to any one challenge. We need to apply a number of technologies, but one technology, or rather group of technologies, which I think will be central for adaptation going forward is early warning systems.

As we see more extreme weather events like storms and hurricanes, early warning systems are really going to be key to help protect lives and assets from these damaging events. But not only for these, you know, sudden extreme weather events, but also for the slow onset stressors like drought. Early warning systems can help farmers plant their crops and yields based on what they see coming in the near future.

And here technology has a large role to play, using the help of sensors and GPS and satellites. Early warning systems don't have to be complicated, so that's what's exciting a little bit, that we've seen examples of social media being used to sort of crowdsource data during disasters and coordinate communities to find shelter and find the resources they need to join a disaster.

The United Nations has also now pledged full coverage to entire global population for early warning systems within the next five years. So I think we'll see a lot more innovation in this space.

Peter Oksen: From my side, so I can maybe also add to what Shanar said about the early warning systems because they're also enablers of crop insurances, or especially index-based crop insurances, which can be extremely important for farmers in poor countries to be able to withstand some of the impacts of climate change.

So basically the way that it works is that the data that the satellites and other sensors provide can be used to trigger payments of crop insurances if the crop fails, for example, earlier than what it's doing today and thereby can help to alleviate a very serious situation for farmers. This is something that is gaining quite a lot of importance in many regions of the world and is promoted by some of the big international aid organizations like, for example, the World Food Program also.

But otherwise, other good things, there are so many good technologies in there, but there's a nice little one that is very simple. And it's something called AWD or alternate wetting and drying, and it has to do with addressing the issue of water use and methane emissions in rice cultivation or patty rice or wet rice cultivation.

So the way that rice is cultivated is that the fields are flooded during most of the part of the growing season, and when the fields are flooded, of course it uses quite a lot of water because it evaporates and it also generates quite a lot of methane emissions. And methane is a very strong greenhouse gas, which has a much stronger greenhouse effect than CO2 has.

So therefore, it's actually quite a big contribution. It's about probably around 12% of all emissions from the agricultural sector that comes from this, so the International Rice Research Institute, which is based in Philippines and which is one of these global public research institutions, they were actually the fathers of the Green Revolution back in the sixties.

They have discovered that actually it's not needed to flood the rice fields during the whole season. So actually you can alternate between wet periods and dry periods, so basically you drain the fields during certain times of the growing season of the rice. And it actually does not decrease the yield, and actually on the contrary, it increases this.

So both you save the water, which is good for adaptation and helps the farmers to adapt to have less water. And at the same time, you reduce methane emissions, so thereby you contribute to mitigation. And that is something that we have also seen. That's part of our work here, that a lot of the technologies we have found don't fit so well into this dichotomy between adaptation and mitigation, but they actually bridge these two sectors quite well.

The beautiful thing about this, I wouldn't necessarily call it technology of course, it is based on technology in the way that you do need to have a good management of your water resources. You need to have level rice fields and so on, but other than that, in terms of equipment, all you need to do is basically have a plastic tube that you dig into the soil, and then you can monitor the level of the water in the soil.

And when it goes beyond a certain level, then you know, "Okay, now we need to add some water to keep it that level" or "we need to flood it for a little while and then we can take the water out again". So very technologically simple and cheap if you have the good irrigation technology available already, and something that has a very huge potential impact, both in terms of farmer's livelihood, but also for the climate change.

Lise McLeod: Thank you for those, and I know that they will entice our listeners to delve into the resource and take a closer look. What can we expect coming up? Is there anything that you're able to share with us now regarding the book and the evolution of additional technologies?

Peter Oksen: Yes, of course we, so we started this publication last year, but it's not a one-off thing. It's actually planned to be an annual publication and with the reception it has received so far, we are quite encouraged to go on during this. So we are already heavily occupied by making the next edition of the Green Technology Book, and that will focus on climate change mitigation technologies.

It's not a secret, you can actually go into the database and look at the Green Technology Book collection and you can see what technologies we have already collected in the different areas we focus on. So mitigation is a very, very large technological area, so we have to make some difficult choices in terms of delimiting it. So we are guided by, where are the major emissions from various sectors. And then we try to focus on the ones where we think there's a good potential for technology to play a role.

So that means that we are focusing on three major areas. So industry, and here we look into specifically steel and cements because those are some of the really big emitters. And then we look also into industry 4.0, that is a new term for high tech management in industrial sector. And see what that has to contribute with.

We look at cities and there we focus on various areas that are relevant for that. So that's about a lot about heating and cooling and ventilation. It's also about mobility. It's also about waste management, and it's also about how we construct our buildings.

And then we look into agriculture where there's also a lot of things that can be done, and there especially the livestock sector, is one of the big emitters within agriculture. But we also look at how soils can be better managed. We look at rice cultivation and I'm sure that alternate wetting and drying will fit in very well here. And we also look at information technology as a part of the solution in agriculture there.

And we also do that actually in cities where we also look at smart cities to some degree. So we want to launch this again at the COP 28 in UAE in early December, late November. And we are looking very much forward for this book to become more and more of a solid resource for people who want to understand what technology can do for this.

Going further forward. We plan to do other editions, of course, every year. How long we will stay on climate change, we don't know. Basic idea is that we will look into all the green technology areas going forward, but it's not a kind of point in time publication. Since it's digital, since it links up to the database, we very much want to keep it alive and keep it updated. We will not update the publication itself every few months. We can't do that because it's a publication and registered as a publication, but we will update it now and then. But in the database, there's room for as much as we can find and as people want to upload.

And as such, it is an ever-growing resource for what is out there of technology as solutions to some of the issues that we are looking into here. So stay tuned, have a look at what we are doing and keep coming back and contribute to the process by uploading to the database and be part of the solutions.

Lise McLeod: Well, Peter, Shanar, I'd like to thank you both for your time today and for sharing this really exciting, evolving, expanding project on green technology. Thanks for joining us.

Peter Oksen: Thank you for the opportunity.

Shanar Tabrizi: Thanks for inviting us.

Lise McLeod: I hope that you enjoyed listening to our conversation about the Green Technology Book. As Peter mentioned, a PDF is available for download and an online version of the content is also available via the WIPO website. Let's keep an eye out for the launch of the next edition at COP 28.

Until next time, and the next Page Points, bye for now.