Achieving greater access: A new role for established legal principles?

This chapter discusses the extent to which different legal fields might be combined to make a substantive contribution to the battle against climate change. Firstly, how can intellectual property (IP), competition and human rights, separately and together, assist in identifying essential technologies? Secondly, if the goal in respect of climate change should not be access to essential technologies but the generation of and use of more technologies of all kinds, what role can be played by IP, competition and human rights? Finally, it will be argued that greater access to some climate change-related technologies is required – and when this is so, what is the place of the three fields in delivering this? This chapter will focus on solutions which could be developed in the European Union (EU). It is of course the case, as recognized throughout this collection, that climate change has implications well beyond the EU. Yet the EU is a sophisticated legal environment; if a solution exploring the interface between these three fields cannot be developed there, this may suggest that the approach is not of wider global relevance.