Play in tune

Increased international cooperation is needed to channel technologies from rich to developing nations to arrest climate change, said participants at the two-day Beijing High-level Conference on Climate Change: Technology Development and Technology Transfer held earlier this month.

Co-sponsored by the Chinese government and the United Nations, the conference had participants from nearly 100 governments, international and non-governmental organizations voicing views and proposing measures on technology and climate change.

At the opening ceremony, China Premier Wen Jiabao urged rich nations to transfer greenhouse gas emissions-curbing technology to China and other developing countries, and address climate change "responsibly" by changing their "unsustainable lifestyles".

The international community should establish a fund and mechanism for overcoming technology transfer barriers, he said.

"As the global financial crisis spreads, the international community must not waver in its determination to tackle climate change," Wen said.

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said increasing food and fuel prices and global financial turmoil have undermined progress in tackling climate change and impeded the world's development agenda.

Conference participants discussed the status of clean technologies, the barriers to transfer, as well as mechanisms to overcome them. Public-private cooperation and partnerships were highlighted as an area where the majority of the investments will be made.

They also stressed the importance to provide early sharing of technologies so that these technologies can be adapted to differing climates and national conditions.

Ban said: "New thinking and specific measures are necessary to remove existing barriers to clean technology transfer and diffusion. Clean technologies have proven their worth again and again."

China and other developing countries want technology transfer to be provided a new global climate treaty at the Copenhagen Climate Conference next year.

Sha Zukang, UN Under- Secretary General for Economic and Social Affairs, strongly criticized developed countries for failing to keep previous promises given to poor countries.

"The transfer of technology is not good enough, to put it mildly. Commitments are repeated hundreds of thousands of times, but these commitments are not honored," he claimed.

Xie Zhenhua, deputy director of the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) said: "China is still developing and we need money in many respects, but despite this we are very willing to invest in efforts to tackle climate change."

Xie said China has already budgeted about $440 billion as part of its efforts to reduce energy consumption and pollution in the coming years.

He also said that a system should be adopted to encourage developed countries to pass on technology, which at the same time also protects patents and intellectual copyrights.

Lin Erda, one of China's leading negotiators on climate change and also one of the speakers at the conference, said that the adaptation cost for developing countries is estimated by the United Nations Development Program at $86 billion to $109 billion a year. But developed countries have so far offered just $5 billion to $10 billion.

Currently, more than 90 percent of advanced technology related to climate change is in the hands of developed countries," said Joerg Moczadlo, program director of the German Technical Cooperation in Beijing. "But they are reluctant to provide it to developing countries out of concern for losing their competitiveness," he said.

For example, some of the companies in the developed countries just would not give China their most advanced technologies, like the technology to produce 5MW-wind turbines, not even for money, because they think China is not a market for them, said Moczadlo.

According to He Jiankun, professor of Tsinghua University, China only needs state-of-art technologies regarding carbon capturing and storage.

He said: "China does not need some elementary technologies, as we are actually exporting them to the less developed counties."

Financial crisis vs climate change

Wu Jianmin, the former Chinese ambassador to France, said previously that a low-carbon economy would represent another new economic growth area.

He urged government officials at all levels along with Chinese enterprises to further promote businesses linked to promoting a low-carbon economy in many of the country's industries.

Zhou Dadi, a researcher with the Energy Research under the NDRC, echoed Wu's comments, saying environmental protection and energy saving technologies and projects should be given priority when the government is trying to stimulate domestic demand.

Yvo de Boer, executive director of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. said: "It is undeniable that the financial crisis will have an impact on the climate change negotiations.

He said the solution is to directly target polluters as a revenue source for developing countries.

"If international technology transfers happen, developing countries like China will be able to take action that is not affordable to them at the moment," he added.

IPR issues

Part of the challenge to be discussed at the conference is on the one hand, how to make modern energy technologies available more cheaply, while at the same time, respecting the investment and the research undertaken in order to develop that technology.

The developed nations' hopes to obtain clean power-generation equipment had been frustrated by worries about intellectual property theft, lost profits and security sensitive technology.

Participants agreed a mechanism is needed to provide better protection for intellectual property, which is essential to encourage the development of new technologies.

"However, we do expect companies from the developed nations to lower their cost of intellectual property. Over-commercialization has driven that cost too high," said He Jiankun.

"In this regard, the government should provide some incentives to the companies that export environmentally-friendly technologies, so that they could lower their prices for intellectual property," he said.

Professor Zou Ji from China's Remin University suggested that a technology transfer body could pair government support with private investors, easing worries about commercial returns and intellectual property safeguards.

Public-private cooperation

The participants also recommended the establishment of a technology leveraging facility, whereby people would have access to money through an international financial institution in order to draw new technologies into the market.

"There's a certain degree of innovation that is affordable to the private sector. But if you want to get to the really advanced technologies, which are not affordable to the private sector, you might need some public sector support. And that's a matter of combining public and private money so that you can go the extra green mile that's not possible under normal market circumstances," said de Boer.

The meeting was held in the run-up to the next Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in Poznan, Poland in December 2008, where countries will begin negotiations for a climate change accord to succeed the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which expires in 2012.

(China Daily 11/17/2008 page4)