Week 9: Climate Change Mitigation and Adaptation

Along with the subject of health, this week we are also concentrating on climate change mitigation and adaptation. Apache Open Climate Workbench is “a platform designed to create climate evaluations using models developed from a range of sources including NASA, the U.S. National Climate Assessment, and the Coordinated Regional Climate Downscaling Experiment, among many others.” (Apache) The system is able to create climate computations based on these analyses and then projecting the predictions. Through an open source platform Apache is able to realistically forecast climate change and thus the effect of humans on it. The realistic assessment of our climate and its changing tendencies is becoming extremely important towards creating environmental change. Apache is able to provide information critical for proving our effect on the climate and thus creating economic and political change. “A core element of the climate assessment is numerical model predictions that not only provide a foretelling of physical indicators of future climate but also indirectly provide information on societal impacts and thus provide a key resource for addressing adaptation and mitigation questions.” (Apache) Apache is helping create much needed change in our political system that hopefully will increase our positive involvement with the environment and implement severe consequences for hurting it.

WIPO has become increasingly involved in the fight against climate change. They claim that total investment in Climate Change and Mitigation Technologies (CCMT’s), but specifically renewable energy and fuels, was $244 billion in 2012. The growing investment in CCMT’s has also strongly increased the global patent filing rates. In some cases the average annual growth rates of patents in this sector grew 8x between 1975-2006. “The growth in patenting rates in the respective technology is likely a combination of the positive impact of policies and response to market conditions, including increased levels of R&D investment, shifts in policy incentives, such as feed-in-tariffs, as well as technological advances, such as cost reductions in manufacturing.” (WIPO) The reasons for growth in patent rates above are most likely correct, however, filing for intellectual property and installing the designs have become increasingly time intensive. Intellectual property, and specifically in the field of climate change, has become not as effective compared to open source design. Open source design provides an easily accessible way to get involved in the fight against climate change without the need for resource and monetary intense research like that needed for intellectual property. Like that of the Danish Concept, mentioned in my Energy blog, OSD has provided an incredible system for sharing information and the adaptation for products especially in the sphere of climate change mitigation.