India has urged France — the official host of the UN-sponsored global climate change conference scheduled in Paris in December — to facilitate a consensus on the need to ensure that high intellectual property rights (IPR) costs of green technology do not act as barriers for freer flow of technology to developing countries.
“There is a cost involved with IPR. IPR costs should not be something that inhibits businesses in developing countries adopt those technologies. I am hoping that as presidency, France will take serious note of it and try to incorporate in the agreement by facilitating some kind of a consensus on the issue,” Susheel Kumar, Additional Secretary, Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change, said.
Kumar was speaking at a session on the agenda for the 21st Climate Conference in Paris (COP-21) organised by industry body FICCI on Monday.
New Delhi also feels that developed countries take a long time in parting with their technologies, a process which needs to be fast-tracked. “Developing countries often feel that there is reluctance on part of countries holding IPRs to part with cutting edge technology within a short timeframe. We have to find a mechanism in which this reluctance, which is a barrier, vanishes or at least gets diminished,” Kumar said.
Agreeing with Kumar, special representative of the French Government for COP 21 Laurence Tubiana said technology dissemination indeed needed to be speeded up and the issue of financing technology also has to be addressed. “Countries have to think about financing technology transfer. This is a big condition for implementation of an agreement in Paris,” Tubiana said.
Tubiana said that industry, including Indian firms, need to participate actively in the dialogue on climate change and take ownership for the decisions being taken by their governments.
India is also working on finalising its goals for arresting climate change — called intended nationally determined contributions (INDCs) — which all countries have to submit to the UN climate change secretariat ahead of the Paris meet.