A joint EPO-UNEP study: “Patents and climate change mitigation technologies in Latin America and the Caribbean”
This joint study by the EPO and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) finds that Latin America and the Caribbean has considerable untapped renewable energy potential, which could be harnessed to serve the region’s rapidly growing energy needs.
It concludes that the patent system has an important but largely under-exploited role to play in fostering climate-friendly innovation in the region, and also technology transfer to and from the region.
While there are more than 1.9 million patent documents related to climate change mitigation technologies in the EPO’s free online patent database Espacenet, less than 3% of the global total of patent applications in these technologies was filed in Latin America and the Caribbean in the period 1995-2010.
Entitled “Patents and climate change mitigation technologies in Latin America and the Caribbean”, the report was presented at a conference hosted by UNEP on 9 December 2014 on the fringes of the UNFCCC COP 20 in Lima, Peru.
This is the third in a series of joint EPO-UNEP reports focusing on trends in patent filings reflecting innovation and transfer of climate change-related technologies. The two previous reports were “Patents and clean energy technologies” (2010) and “Patents and clean energy technologies in Africa” (2013).
The EPO has also developed a dedicated Y02/4 classification scheme for patent documents relating to climate change mitigation technologies, which greatly increases the accessibility of these documents in the EPO’s public patent information services and the transparency of patent trends in this field.
Source: EPO
