Any international response to climate change must address the international transfer of environmentally sound technologies. Mitigating and adapting to climate change will require a major shift in economy-wide production and consumption patterns and the development and diffusion of technologies is a fundamental and necessary element of that transformation.
The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and its Kyoto Protocol were built on a fundamental political bargain directly involving technology transfer. Industrialized countries, however, havelargely failed to provide effective transfer of environmentally sound, climate-related technologies. This failure was the primary bone of contention during the Bali Conference of the Parties (COP 13) in December 2007, and lay behind the refusal of developing countries to agree to negotiations for a new commitment period. Developing countries also argued strongly for a reorientation of the near-term elements of the bargain to focus on climate change impacts and the manner in which they disproportionately and negatively affect developing countries, especially Small Island Developing States (SIDS) and least developed countries (LDCs).
The lack of progress in the UNFCCC in ensuring the effective transfer of technologies may be due to a number of other contributing factors, including: difficulty in determining the scope of technologies to be transferred for mitigation and adaptation, and ad hoc and unreliable processes for matching identified needs with funding. Since the 2007 Bali COP, however, technology transfer has moved to the top of the agenda in the UNFCCC process as one of the four pillars of the post-Kyoto framework. This piece aims to outline some of the historical background to the discussions, identify some of the main players, and to describe the state of the debate on technology transfer after the December 2008 COP 14 in Poznan, Poland.