While urging the international community to view environment-friendly technologies as “global public goods”, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on Thursday said the intellectual property rights (IPR) associated with such technologies needed to be relaxed in such a way that they become accessible and affordable for the developing countries.

Speaking at an international conference on climate change here, Singh suggested that the manner in which drugs for HIV/AIDS had been subsidised and made available to a large part of the world could serve as a model for diffusion of green technologies.

“Climate-friendly and environmentally sound technologies should be viewed as global public goods. This implies that the IPR regime applied to those goods should balance rewards for innovators with the need to promote the common good of humankind. Suitable mechanisms must be found that will provide incentives for developing new technologies while also facilitating their deployment in developing countries at affordable cost,” the PM said.

“Such an approach has been adopted successfully in the case of pharmaceutical technologies for the benefit of HIV/AIDS victims in developing countries. The moral case of a similar approach for protecting our planet and its life support system is equally compelling,” he said. “Technology and its diffusion will be a key element in meeting the challenge of climate change.”

Access to green technology on affordable prices is one of the main issues being discussed as part of the global climate change framework to succeed the Kyoto Protocol.

The Prime Minister’s proposal found some support by the executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Yve de Boer as well, though he pointed out some practical difficulties in comparing the case with HIV/AIDS.

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