ENVIRONMENT: Technology Transfer Crucial To Tackle Climate Change

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Jaya Ramachandran

THE HAGUE, Nov 15 2000 (IPS) - Official development assistance continues to be significant for the transfer of environmentally sound technologies to the developing countries, according to a new report.

Co-authored by a group of scientists from around the world, the report was introduced this week to environmental policy makers gathered in The Hague, capital of the Netherlands, at the sixth session of the conference of parties (COP6) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).

“ODA (an acronym for aid) is still important for those parts of the world and sectors where private sector flows are comparatively low, like agriculture, forestry, human health and costal ozone management,” says the report.

“Moreover it can support the creation of enabling conditions, which may leverage larger flows of private finance into ESTs (an acronym for environmentally sound technologies) in the context of overall sustainable development goals in the recipient countries,” adds the report.

Technology transfer is described as a broad set of processes covering the flows of know-how, experience and equipment for mitigating and adapting to climate change.

Transfer of technology for adaptation to climate change is an important element of reducing vulnerability to climate change, to which several developing countries are exposed, explains the IPCC working group’s report.

Under the climate convention, the international community has accepted its responsibility to assist the least developed countries, small island states, and other vulnerable regions to adapt to the impacts of climate change and of policies to reduce emissions,

Some of these states have called for various funds or programmes on adaptation, climate-related disasters, and research and observation.

Other states are urging action to assist or compensate governments – notably the oil-exporting developing countries – that may be affected by efforts to meet the targets set out at Kyoto in 1997.

“These issues need to be part of the overall package at COP6,” says a background paper prepared by the UNFCCC secretariat, based in Bonn.

Against this backdrop, technology transfer has emerged as a crucial issue for ongoing deliberations at the two-week long COP6, which ends Nov 24.

The scientists’ panel points out that foreign direct investment (FDI), commercial lending, and equity investment are the dominant means by which the private sector makes technology-based investments in developing countries and economies in transition.

These often benefit the industry, energy supply and transportation sectors.

However, private sector investment in the form of FDI in developing countries has favoured East and South East Asia, and Latin America, scientists belonging to technology transfer working group of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) say.

“These trends are altering the relative capacities and roles of different stake holders,” says the report.

The IPCC working group adds: “The importance of the private sector has increased substantially. However, there is a definite role for governments both in providing an enabling environment for the technology transfer process as well as participating directly in it.”

The panel was set up by the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) in association with the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) to assess periodically “the science, impacts and socio- economics of climate change”.

The first session of the conference of parties (COP1) to the climate change convention five years ago in Berlin, requested the IPCC to include in its assessment an elaboration of the terms under which transfer of environmentally sound technologies and know-how could take place.

The special report was presented Monday by Bert Metz, chairman of the working group on technology transfer.

Technology transfer results from actions taken by various stake holders.

Key stakeholders include developers, owners, suppliers, buyers, recipients and users of technology (such as private firms, state enterprises, and individual consumers), financiers and donors, governments, international institutions, NGOs and community groups.

Some technology is transferred directly between government agencies or wholly within vertically integrated firms, but increasingly technology flows depend also on the co-ordination of multiple organisations such as networks of information service providers, business consultants and financial firms.

The report says: “Although stakeholders play different roles, there is a need for partnerships among stake holders to create successful transfers. Governments can facilitate such partnerships.”

There is a large number of pathways through which stake holders can interact to transfer technologies, according to the scientists.

They vary depending on sectors, country circumstances and type of technology. Pathways may be different for “close to market” technologies and for technology innovations still in the development phase.

Common pathways include government assistance programmes, direct purchases, licensing, foreign direct investment, joint ventures, cooperative research arrangements and co-production agreements, education and training, and government direct investment.

While technology transfer processes can be complex and intertwined, certain stages can be identified. These may include the identification of needs, choice of technology, assessment of conditions of transfer, agreement and implementation. Evaluation and adjustment to local conditions, and replication are other important stages.

Representatives of world’s largest environmental non- governmental organisations say solution to the disastrous consequences of global warming gas emissions are at hand. It is just a question of implementing these.

The rapid introduction of renewable energy systems in developing countries would be an efficient use of energy and could end the industrialised states’ exporting and financing of “dirty energy” to the developing countries, says Greenpeace International’s Bill hare.