Invention and Global Diffusion of Technologies for Climate Change Adaptation : A Patent Analysis
The Earth's climate has already begun to change and will inevitably continue to do so. Even if the targets set in the Paris Agreement are met—to keep the global surface temperature increase below 2 degrees Celsius relative to preindustrial lev...
| Main Authors: | , , , , |
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| Format: | Report |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
World Bank, Washington, DC
2020
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/648341591630145546/Invention-and-Global-Diffusion-of-Technologies-for-Climate-Change-Adaptation-A-Patent-Analysis http://hdl.handle.net/10986/33883 |
| Summary: | The Earth's climate has already
begun to change and will inevitably continue to do so. Even
if the targets set in the Paris Agreement are met—to keep
the global surface temperature increase below 2 degrees
Celsius relative to preindustrial levels—many regions will
still suffer severely from the consequences of climate
change. They will have more frequent extreme weather events,
changes in precipitation patterns, rising sea levels,
temperature increases, and many other related effects (IPCC
2018). In this context, technology is certainly a major tool
to increase societies’ ability to adapt to the adverse
effects of climate change (Klein and Tol 1997; Miao 2017;
GCA 2019). International technology transfer hence becomes
particularly important because a large fraction of the
innovation activity in today's knowledge-based economy
takes place in the Global North, while technologies for
climate change adaptation are urgently needed in low- and
middle-income countries, which are particularly vulnerable
to climate shocks (Fankhauser and McDermott 2014) Increasing
the availability of technology in vulnerable countries
requires knowledge of the current geography of innovation.
To that end, this report uses patent data to describe and
quantify the invention and global diffusion of technologies
for climate change adaptation over recent decades based on a
global patent database. Importantly, relying on patent data
restricts the scope of the analysis to solutions for
adaptation that are at the technological frontier and
excludes the role of nontechnological forms of innovation
and low-tech options. A particular emphasis is put on the
case of low- and middle-income countries, which combine high
vulnerability to climate change with low technological
resources. The analysis relies on patent data from the World
Patent Statistical Database (PATSTAT), maintained by the
European Patent Office (EPO), which covers the population of
patents filed worldwide. We use the EPO's new
"Y02A" category to identify all patents in PATSTAT
pertaining to "technologies for adaptation to climate
change." The classification was released in April 2018
and has so far never been used in empirical analyses.
Although innovation scholars and analysts widely use patent
data to map technology fields, such data do have some
drawbacks, as the report discusses. The patent data are thus
complemented with data on foreign direct investment (FDI),
which allow us to test the robustness of the results on
technology transfer. |
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