Climate change is a serious global issue that warrants examining its global impacts. Green technology is the most essential measure in combating climate change, but there are troubles concerning intellectual property (IP) rights. This paper takes a look at the intricate interactions between climate change, green technology, and IP, bringing different types of opportunities as well as challenges under focus. The IP rights are core drivers in innovation or rather in investment in green technologies. For instance, patents are able to protect inventions, which allow companies to recover research and make money.

This is on the same side for trademarks regarding the purity of products, boosting consumers' trust, and thus creating broader acceptance of a product. Notwithstanding, IP rights also act as restrictions in the spread of and access to green technologies. Certain patent monopolies might abuse their right and demand so high licensing fees; thus, entry is restricted. Trade secrets impede also knowledge sharing as they can slow down the process of developing green solutions.

There are many types of policies and legal frameworks that could stimulate the transfer and dissemination of green technologies. For example, open licensing agreements could provide fair sharing of patented technologies, while technology pools would foster collaborative IP sharing for fast-tracking innovative processes. Governments are key players in supplying subsidies, tax credits, and procurement policies to facilitate the uptake of green technology and enable international cooperative initiatives and knowledge sharing to strengthen the technology transfer.

Introduction:
Confronting climate change is arguably one of the most significant experiences of our time. Innovation and technology will have to continue playing crucial roles in the response to this challenge as part of their legacy. Technology is used as a key mechanism for addressing climate change and managing its consequences, and international agreements, national laws and policy initiatives are testimony to this assertion. Technology development is mostly driven by initiatives capable of being kept secret at the hands of the private sector, typically protected by Intellectual Property Rights (IPR). These rights allow limiting access to fruits from such innovation by other parties, thereby placing several technologies critical in the fight against climate change in the hands of too few individuals.

It is a really complex polycentric issue intertwined with technology and climate change. There are continual debates on what moral and governance frameworks should be drawn by all actors from the international level to local entities and private organizations, especially regarding the role of IP in innovation. This paper intends to address a particular legal challenge in the global political, scientific, social, and legal context towards handling targeted legal solutions. The study range is vast, yet it delves on certain aspects in-depth, primarily looking at the intersection of IP laws and climate change and various public and private perspectives they tend to raise.

Mitigation and adaptation measures against climate change have many special implications for Intellectual Property Rights (IPRs), and conversely, the IPRs also affect the pace and the extent to which developing countries would be able to access technology for such efforts. Thus, important discussion exists on the apparent need to reform IPR laws in order to dismantle the barriers to international technology transfer.

The role of intellectual property rights (IPRs) in the fight against global climate change has engendered fervid debate on the subject. In order to effectively combat climate change, technological innovations need to be promoted, more particularly ones geared at mitigating and adapting to its effects. Many proponents maintain that IPRs-especially patent rights-are indispensable for this technological development.

The Director of the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) Michelle Lee says that the "patent system is the key to foster its innovation in our economy." Apologists for patents argue that without the possibility of strong patent protection, companies would have to think twice before investing huge amounts of money into research and development necessary for technological advancement. Thus, in this sense, responses to global climate change exert tremendous influence over the existence of robust patent protection.

Climate change and Its impacts:

Assessing the impact of climate change is fundamentally an intricate exercise with uncertainties about the level of global warming in the future and the collateral effects of that warming upon global activities themselves. While some benefits accrue to global warming, there are various costs that come with it. Then again, technological innovation remains an unknown factor that could impact and therefore alter the course of global warming. Globally, warming is on the rise.

Once a highly controversial and contested issue, the fact of global warming- whether natural or anthropogenic-is now accepted across the globe. Most countries within the international community are signatories to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), thus an international agreement on global warming mitigation. It follows, therefore, that members of the UNFCCC are jointly committed to addressing climate change, which pertains, whether directly or indirectly, to human activities that alter the composition of the global atmosphere, along with the natural variability of the climate system on timescales of interest. The growing international consensus regarding the issues related to climate change was in some part made possible because of the availability of credible scientific data on the causes and effects of global warming.

These reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) assess and project climate change phenomena with varying degrees of credibility in the sight of the world. IPCC, an intergovernmental scientific body, was established by the United Nations Environment Program and the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) to review and assess existing data on climate change and provide "comprehensive and balanced scientific information to policymakers."

Confronting climate change is one of the major challenges of the 21st Century. There remains a lot of debate over whether climate change is an issue of present-day affairs aggravated by human activities or simply part of the natural cycles of the Earth. But one thing is for sure: climate change affects societies in various significant forms. In particular, emissions of greenhouse gases affect the global temperature, hence causing rising sea levels that threaten areas such as polar ice caps and low-lying Pacific islands or along the western coast of Scotland. There are also increasing concerns regarding an increased frequency of droughts, the emergence of new diseases, and negative implications on human health.

Intellectual Property Rights: A Challenge or a Tool for Addressing Climate Change

IP law as it is today has often the ethical obligation to compensate inventors. The purpose of IPRs is to result in investment and innovation motivated in the end to benefit all people as a result. On the contrary, a society can be harmed due to failure in establishing IPRs in that inventors and producers may be unmotivated.

This paper states that IPRs could become instrumental in assisting global efforts to avert severe climate change. Certainly, there is an opposing viewpoint. The very terms of extractive IPR have the potential to restrain our innovative efforts toward solutions to the impending environmental crises. This paradox has been interpreted in a number of ways.

Some scholarly commentators take the view that the intellectual property framework will not promote adequate action to mitigate climate change as it does not encourage the kind of broad scientific advancements, especially in energy, necessary to head off the worst climate scenarios. Others argue that the intellectual property system is inadequate to promote climate solutions as it exacerbates the North-south barrier instead of facilitating technology transfer to developing countries. A common thread runs through both critical statements, encapsulated in an essential claim that intellectual property law is hardly fulfilling its primary objective.

The author interrogates a pertinent question as to whether it is the intellectual property rights that obstruct innovation in climate change mitigation by way of concentrating in the short term on the most profitable technologies. It assumes that past measures will spur on the future generation to develop less certain and less profitable climate-change technologies when the urgency of the crisis dawns before them.

The right utility of intellectual property must be comprehended if all of these questions are to be resolved. The scope of protected ideas and the reasoning behind granting them a judicial recognition of property will determine how climate change policymakers address and grapple with the temporality of their issues. Historically, attributing everything solely to intellectual property rights has proven to be a naive and unsophisticated thinker's game. Simply stating that the IP system is flawed does not lead to any meaningful way forward; proposing a solution based on a flawed diagnosis is a surefire way of misdirecting scarce resources towards a solution that is, at best, ineffective and worst, completely inappropriate. Thus, the foremost task is to come to a clear view of what the issue really is before moving to discuss solutions.

Focusing on the issues in the light of an adjusted perspective becomes crucial to handling the supposed ill concerning the infringement of intellectual property rights. This reframing makes one think about whether the intellectual property system's functioning or failure in the context of its basic premise is the real question. Instead of proposing fresh laws concerning intellectual property, one might be better off sketching out a set of parameters with which existing laws may themselves be evaluated and reformed.

This is especially important given that the intellectual property system tends to reward solutions for problems yielding fast cash, such as diabetes, obesity, and impotence, rather than stimulating solutions for long-term issues that are still barely recognized, conceptualized, or valued. The time dimension of the existing intellectual property legal framework is the central theme of this paper; in its turn, climate change considerations press for an entirely different line of thought. The need for international acceleration and dissemination of low-carbon technologies, above all, establishes the link between time and given institutions and legal frameworks.

Strategies for addressing the Intellectual Property Rights Challenges in the context of Climate change

The patent dilemma is best solved with a focus on laws, policies, and institutions rather than a purely individual effort. Individual action, however, can have significant impact as these persons push universities, industries, and governments to adopt appropriate policies.

The modalities of dealing with the IPR challenge can be categorized into the following dominant strips: maintain the existing IPR regime; amend the same; and abolish IPR altogether. The present paper does not propound to be an exhaustive search for all available possible strategies but intends to highlight some of the more prominent ones.

Push Mechanisms and Legislative Reform:

The IPR system creates not just incentives for R&D; it thereby also relies for recognition upon national governments in industrialized countries, which, in many cases, pay for research through competitive grant systems targeting university researchers. A plurality of non-profit foundations also provide funding for research, utilizing more or less the same competitive grant way of doing things.

In most instances, these governments and foundations give preference for R&D that serve national interests and help corporations in the endeavor of commercializing the related R&D output. This kind of funding is called "push mechanism" because it gives initial monetary support to R&D efforts, expecting a product that would be of worth.

One might assume at least the push mechanisms, particularly the publicly funded university research through competitive grants, could somehow avoid the IPR dilemma. But this ignores the fact that the outcomes of publicly funded research seldom remain in the public domain. In many Cases, they can be patented and, in fact, are patented in the USA and in many other countries.

This shows a clear plan: repeal of the Bayh-Dole Act and comparable laws that facilitate the privatization of publicly funded research. The author finds the proposal attractive, but a few important issues need to be tackled. To begin with, the repeal of these acts would offer rather stiff political opposition, being that they are strongly backed by interests in the industry, and no concrete movement promoting their repeal exists currently.

More importantly, CCT-related research in developed countries done by universities or governments does not entail a promise that corporations will not seek to utilize it to develop IP technologies of their own. In essence, therefore, while Bayh-Dole-like repeal may provide an attractive foot in the door, seeing to it that technologies become developed free of IP protection will demand a lot more. This would require a robust level of commitment from governments or other parties not just to research but also to the nurturing of technologies that are IP-free.

Parallel Pull Mechanisms:

The first approach attempts to use push mechanisms to stimulate the invention of climate change technologies (CCTs) with little or no protection under IPR laws to deal with the IPR challenge. This strategy will require amendments to existing laws and several reforms for successful implementation. The second approach offers a concept called "parallel pull mechanisms," which serve to stimulate activities in research and development (R&D) that meet specified success criteria through rewards to innovators.

One form of pull mechanisms is patenting; other forms are technology inducement prizes, which typically provide direct financial rewards with an option for patent protection. Proponents of pull mechanisms argue that they are more effective than push mechanisms, for they do not fund unsuccessful or trite projects and spur researchers on to work fast and efficiently. Parallel pull mechanisms are those which run alongside the patent regime, where accepting an innovation reward effectively disqualifies the possibility of patenting the innovation.

Historically, technology inducement prizes have played an important role in stimulating R&D efforts. A worthy historical example is the prize offered by the British government in 1714 for the invention of a device capable of determining longitude with accuracy. The contemporary instance is the Ansari-X Prize to spur innovations relating to commercial space travel. In terms of climate change, billionaire Richard Branson has announced the offering of a $25 million prize for creating an environmentally friendly and economically viable mechanism for extracting greenhouse gases from the atmosphere.

As previously stated, prizes for the inducement of technology do not in themselves resolve the intellectual property (IP) challenge. Many of these prizes would leave an option for patenting open, and many proponents of prizes argue that they should be compatible with patents. For example, Adler argues that with the urgent threat of global climate change, there needs to be more than patents to get something done.

In the proposal he references, he quotes a study by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, which argues that federal agencies like the National Science Foundation (NSF) should issue technology inducement prizes and also not claim ownership or control over any intellectual property produced by prize-seeking participants. Participants should be allowed to exercise control over their innovations. In addition, most technology inducement prizes do not really encourage the equitable sharing of technologies; rather, those prizes are given for development rather than distribution, with the assumption that market forces will bring ample access to the technology.

One way in which inducement prizes for technology might deal with the problem of IP would be to make contingent receipt of prize awards on the relinquishment of intellectual property rights. No corresponding pull mechanism has ever been proposed for CCTs so far. However, a construct like this with a focus on "pulling" specifically designed to address the problems posed by global climate change could be a practical solution for the possibly very deep IP dilemmas they might create.

Conclusion:
Global climate change is the urgent challenge that needs to be faced immediately. Some solutions, including dismantling the international intellectual property rights (IPR) framework, seem, in theory, to be effective but often prove inadequate for urgent issues. Certainty about which options would be in use in the near future is in itself speculative; for instance, some calamity may strike and within a few years, IPRs may altogether be abolished. Absolute predictions notwithstanding, we can make reasonable assumptions regarding likely outcomes. To all available indications, there are compelling reasons to believe that strategies can be arrived at and initiated earlier. A pragmatic approach, taking into account the political, economic, and legal realities, is most likely to lead this process after initiation.

There has been little progress over the past twenty years in providing international responses to the clean technology transfer to developing countries. As climate change develops and technology progresses, the framework of intellectual property rights and arguments concerning technology access can be expected to quickly become obsolete.

Intellectual Property Rights (IPRs) must either be changed or removed to further reduce Greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions within the principles of intergenerational justice. This process requires trust to be built between developed and developing countries. If such trust is not nurtured, one of the hurdles will be a mutual understanding of shared-and-proportional responsibilities involving technology development and transfer, of which IPRs remain largely an important factor.

Developed countries must take the lead by demonstrating their commitment by swiftly reducing their GHG emissions to build this trust. Such trust could be strengthened further if the richer countries play their part through adequate contributions to the Green Climate Fund and other international organizations engaged in technology transfer. IPR systems must quickly undergo reform to bring about changes in the incentive structure to eliminate the bottlenecks for the growth and dissemination of low-carbon technologies.

Without fostering such trust and embedding the requisite safeguards, future generations may have to pay dearly. In terms of IPRs, it means that whatever is subject to protection may find diminished importance or total irrelevance. This especially applies to biological resources and matters even more in the context of dealing with severe climate change. And besides, catastrophic climate change challenges any meaningfulness to the whole realm of IPR's application. Thus, several vital aspects of existing IPR systems would presuppose the truth of something that no longer may be valid in a future where catastrophic climate changes are a present concern.

In the past, the chief reason for granting private monopolistic rights-protected forms used for the promotion of creativity leading to the enhancement and enrichment of an ever-growing pool of ideas-was the belief in a constant trajectory of wealth and prosperity. These basic assumptions are now being fundamentally questioned with the existential threat posed by climate change.

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