Mudanças climáticas, transferência de tecnologia e direitos de propriedade intelectual

Abstract

For more than two decades, national governments have been striving to create a robust, integrated and overarching regulating system for managing climate change. Given the multidimensionality of the problem of climate change, the international efforts formulated to tackle this issue are characterized by interrelationships between several international regimes, in such a way that the commitments, rules and norms agreed on a certain regime may affect achieving commitments agreed on the domains of the climate change regime. This thesis draws upon the decentralized character of the climate change regime and its complexity to analyze how the intellectual property regime (in the post-TRIPS context) affects nation-states‟ capacities to achieve international commitments laid down by the climate change regime, especially if the intellectual property rights represent a barrier to the access and transfer of technology to developing countries – which is a fundamental question to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. We conclude that the intellectual property regime, through its universal minimum standards, hinders the access to knowledge and the diffusion of low carbon technologies. In addition, the climate change regime is unable to draw up more effective measures regarding technology transfer, especially because the resistance from developed countries to negotiate intellectual property-related questions. Nonetheless, we consider that the importance and role of intellectual property rights cannot be neglected in order to guarantee the success of the climate change regime.