By Pedro Ivo Ferraz da Silva

BRASÍLIA — Imagine a global economy in which countries were roughly equally equipped with research institutions, technology development laboratories, and industrial production facilities. Such nations might compete fiercely, form rival alliances, and contend aggressively for raw materials and natural resources. Yet a more optimistic scenario is also conceivable. Because each country would understand its own challenges best, it could design solutions tailored to local circumstances, building systems and equipment at exactly the scale required. Where national competences complement one another, governments could pursue mutually beneficial collaborations, mobilizing scientists, technology, and manufacturing capacity toward shared objectives.

Unfortunately, the trajectory of human development has pointed in the opposite direction. Since the first Industrial Revolution and the emergence of a genuinely global economy around the turn of the 19th century, goods and technologies have reached the most remote corners of the world, but the capacity to design, build, market, and extract value from them has remained highly concentrated.

By the mid-1800s, steam locomotives were already in operation across nearly 60 countries or colonies, yet only Britain, the United States, and certain German states possessed the full capability to manufacture them. Telegraphic networks followed a similarly uneven pattern. The automobile industry, which emerged at the turn of the 20th century and became emblematic of post–World War II globalization through the internationalization of manufacturing — particularly in large developing nations across Asia and Latin America — told the same story. Yet only two of those economies, Japan and South Korea, succeeded in joining the exclusive ranks of original equipment manufacturers.

After the Cold War, the information-technology sector pushed this model to an extreme under the banner of "Designed in California, assembled in China," sharpening the division between knowledge-intensive, well-paid activities and labor-intensive, low-wage operational roles.

The rise and diffusion of clean-energy industries and other climate technologies initially raised hopes that history might follow a different course. When China began capturing global market share in solar panel and wind turbine production, some analysts suggested that "green windows of opportunity" could open throughout the developing world. Having mastered the inner workings of new technologies through joint ventures and licensing agreements with providers from advanced economies, China appeared to have established a replicable blueprint.

The geographical diversification of technological innovation, however, has remained more aspiration than achievement. The International Energy Agency reports that while clean-energy technologies are spreading rapidly — solar capacity has grown tenfold since 2015 — manufacturing capabilities remain strikingly concentrated. Across most clean-energy supply chains, 60–85 percent of production capacity is clustered in no more than five countries, with certain individual segments exceeding 95 percent. Despite intensifying efforts to diversify production, no substantial shift in the geography of these supply chains is probable before 2030.

This concentration has become a policy preoccupation not only for developing nations but for advanced economies as well. The United States' Inflation Reduction Act, the European Union's Net-Zero Industry Act, and India's production-linked incentive schemes for solar manufacturing all represent significant attempts to re-shore or expand domestic clean-energy production — yet they also risk fragmenting global markets through tariffs, subsidies, and local-content rules, potentially slowing deployment in regions that lack the fiscal space to compete on equal terms.

This pattern is no longer limited to mature technologies such as solar panels, wind turbines, and batteries. Emerging sectors including electrolyzers for low-emission hydrogen and small modular nuclear reactors are already displaying comparable dynamics. Data compiled by the OECD indicate that approximately 92 percent of patents for new environment- and climate-related technologies in 2023 originated from China, Japan, South Korea, the United States, and the European Union. Rather than producing a more distributed industrial and technological landscape, the low-carbon transition appears to be replicating a familiar historical pattern: adoption is global, but the knowledge, productive capacity, and value creation remain concentrated in a remarkably small number of countries.

Bridging this divide will be difficult. The Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean has argued that a "big push" is needed to mobilize the coordinated investments required to transform productive structures and cultivate domestic technological and innovation capabilities in countries and regions that have been left behind.

Multilateral climate institutions are acutely aware of this challenge. Last year, parties to the Paris Agreement, convening under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, adopted the Belém Technology Implementation Programme, which seeks to ensure that environmentally sound technologies are deployed throughout the developing world. The initiative is named for the Brazilian city that will host COP30 in 2025, underscoring the priority that Brazil's presidency has placed on closing the technology gap between industrialized and developing nations.

A pioneering aspect of this initiative is its insistence on domestic innovation as essential, rather than treating the transfer of finished, off-the-shelf technologies as sufficient. The program recognizes that technologies conceived, developed, and produced locally are best suited to addressing context-specific challenges and generating economic value.

Technology transfer undoubtedly remains a cornerstone, but it should occur within a framework that encompasses the entire technological cycle. Transfers can take place at multiple stages of the innovation process — spanning research and design through demonstration, deployment, and commercialization — rather than being restricted to the diffusion of fully mature solutions. Such an approach would expand opportunities for learning, adaptation, and innovation within recipient countries.

Implementing the Belém program will encounter numerous obstacles, ranging from geopolitical tensions and trade barriers to the diversion of financial resources toward security and defense. The same industrial policies that are drawing clean-energy investment back toward advanced economies are simultaneously narrowing the space for multilateral cooperation on technology access. Nevertheless, the additional value unlocked by a new approach should not be overlooked. In developing his concept of "cosmotechnics," Chinese philosopher Yuk Hui observes that technologies are not universal; they carry the worldview and values of the places where they originate. To counter the legacy of colonialism, persistent inequality, and the harms associated with the industrial age, humanity must decisively embrace "technodiversity."

A credible response to climate change demands more than the large-scale deployment of standardized clean technologies. It requires expanding the world's capacity to understand problems, devise solutions, and construct the systems needed to resolve them. The success of the low-carbon transition should be measured not solely by the speed at which technologies diffuse, but also by the breadth with which the capabilities to innovate, adapt, and produce them are distributed. A safer climate will depend on both decarbonizing the global economy and democratizing the technological foundations that make such a transformation feasible.

Pedro Ivo Ferraz da Silva is chair of the Technology Executive Committee of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and a career diplomat at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Brazil. The views expressed are those of the author in his personal capacity and do not necessarily reflect the official views or positions of the institutions with which he is affiliated. This article was distributed by Project Syndicate.