Intellectual property policies for solar geoengineering

Abstract

Governance of solar geoengineering is important and challenging, with particular concern arising from commercial actors’ involvement. Policies relating to intellectual property, including patents and trade secrets, and to data access will shape private actors’ behavior and regulate access to data and technologies. There has been little careful consideration of the possible roles of and interrelationships among commercial actors, intellectual property, and intellectual property policy. Despite the current low level of commercial activity and intellectual property rights in this domain, we expect both to grow as research and development continue. Given the public good nature of solar geoengineering, the relationship between the public and private sectors would likely assume a procurement structure. Innovative policy approaches to intellectual property and data access that are specific to solar geoengineering are warranted. These current circumstances also present opportunities for the development of policy and norms that might soon be lost. We consider some possible approaches, and recommend a bottom‐up, primarily nonstate, voluntary “research commons” for patents and data that are related to solar geoengineering. This would facilitate information sharing and limit data fragmentation and trade secrecy. It would also provide an incentive for commons members to pledge to limit some forms of intellectual property acquisition and to assure access on reasonable terms, thereby limiting the need for enforcement. This should help reduce downstream barriers to innovation and to encourage the potential development of technologies at reasonable cost. Such a research commons might also catalyze the adoption of best practices in research and development. This article is categorized under: Policy and Governance > Private Governance of Climate Change Social Status of Climate Change Knowledge > Knowledge and Practice

Stratospheric aerosol injection tactics and costs in the first 15 years of deployment

“…Moreover, judged purely by commercial motives, it is difficult to see how one might utilize SAI solely for local gain without triggering substantial global spillovers, both negative and positive. While there might be a long list of contractors who would eagerly bid to vend hardware, supplies, and services to an SAI endeavor, and there might even be a role for patents along that supply chain (Reynolds et al 2017(Reynolds et al , 2018, we believe strongly that commercial profits must not be a motivating factor in any decisions about whether, when, where, and how to implement SAI. Any entity that intends to engineer the climate of the entire globe must act-and be seen to act-purely out of humanitarian and environmental considerations unclouded by aspirations of direct financial gain.…”

The Ethics of Geoengineering: A Literature Review

“…Patent Challenges Allotting intellectual patent rights will be a major challenge in research, as evidenced by the cancellation of the proposed SPICE project due to various individual researchers claiming patent for the same research (Reynolds et al 2018;Armeni and Redgwell 2015a;Parthasarathy et al 2010;ETC Group 2009).…”

How should we ask questions about the social status of climate change knowledge?

“…For example, we find several articles on climate science and decision‐making (Gillard, Gouldson, Paavola, & van Alstine, ; Hoppe, Wesselink, & Cairns, ; Monteiro, Seixas, & Vieira, ; Pepermans & Maeseele, ). Another group of articles addresses technological aspects, with an especial emphasis on geo‐ and climate engineering (Bellamy, Chilvers, Vaughan, & Lenton, ; Belter & Seidel, ; Cairns, ; Linnér & Wibeck, ; Reynolds, Contreras, & Sarnoff, ). The domain has extended into other domains and coproduced articles on communication (Goodwin & Dahlstrom, ; Mitchell, Burch, & Driscoll, ; Nerlich, Koteyko, & Brown, ) and perception (Capstick, Whitmarsh, Poortinga, Pidgeon, & Upham, ; Gagné, Rasmussen, & Orlove, ), and we also find very broad topics such as the sociology of climate change (Zehr, ) and gender and climate change (Pearse, ).…”