Climate change: the UN warns that innovation in low-emission technologies has stalled in the last 10 years

The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) warned today that global innovation in technologies of low carbon emissions has stagnated in the last 10 years, at a time when they need to be boosted to face climate change.

The agency, which is part of the United Nations, issued this Thursday a report on the sectors that have historically predominated in innovation since the beginning of the 20th century, which indicates that from 1973 to 2012 low-emission technologies increased by 6% per year, until stagnant in the last 10 years.

The threat posed by global warming It has not been the same shock as the covid pandemic, which in the last two years revolutionized innovation in fields such as teleworking, changes in demand in the service sector or medical products.

“The rapid development of antivirals and messenger RNA vaccines benefited from an emerging platform that was quickly used to tackle covid thanks to funding and support from governments”, WIPO highlighted.

The organization’s chief economist, Carsten Fink, added in introducing the report that “covid has shown that the direction of innovation can respond to the urgent needs of society, but commitment and investment are needed from governments”.

Currently, the sector that mainly drives innovation, according to the report, is the digitizationwhat has quadrupled in 20 years and that in 2020 it accounted for 12% of all patent applicationswith an annual growth rate of 13%.

Before it was computer science: in 2000, 24% of patents belonged to this sectorand these tripled in the previous 35 years.

At the beginning of the 20th century, the engine of innovation was in the transport sector (patents doubled between the end of the 19th century and 1925), and between 1930 and 1960 that role went to medical technology with the rapid development of vaccines and antibiotics. at that time, according to the study.