Professor Pogge is currently at pre-COP 28 talks in Abu Dhabi, trying to get his idea for a Global Ecological Impact fund on the agenda of the annual UN climate change negotiations.

Pogge is that rarest of things: a renowned academic philosopher attempting to make a measurable impact on the world.

His work is often compared that of his friend Peter Singer – a philosopher best known for his work on animal rights and the effective altruism movement.

In academic literature the two are known for their contrasting approaches to the question of the responsibilities of those in the rich world to those in the poor world.

In simple terms the difference can be boiled down to Singer’s promotion of doing good, versus Pogge’s contention that our first obligation is to stop doing harm.

And the harm that Pogge is focussed on is an intellectual property system that prices new innovations – be they medicine or new green technologies – out of reach of the majority of those living in the global south. 

The patent system works against the uptake of green technologies in poorer countries in two ways: Firstly it pushes the price of new technologies beyond what those in poor countries can afford; and secondly, it incentivises technologies suitable for the developed world.

Pogge’s proposals, the Health Impact Fund and the Ecological Impact Fund, solve those problems with the creation of dedicated funds that reward the creators of innovations with payments for achieving measurable outcomes in exchange for forgoing patent rights in developing countries. 

“We would create a fund that would allow people to register their innovation. Those who register get a share of the fund’s disbursements that is proportional to the green impact or health impact that their innovation achieves in the world,” Pogge says

“But in exchange for that reward, they have to give up their ordinary monopoly privileges, that is to say they have to either allow the innovation to be reproduced by anybody for free or else they have to sell it at cost.”

The result, Pogge says, would be pharmaceuticals and green innovations currently unavailable to those in the developing world could be taken up, and secondly there would be an incentive for innovators to come up with technologies appropriate for poor countries.

Greater GHG emissions reductions to be had in global south

Pogge says investments into greenhouse gas cutting technologies suitable for developing countries would provide much larger returns in terms of emissions avoided than similar sized investments in high-tech green innovation for the rich world.

The Health Impact Fund is the older of the two proposals and, although it’s been well received in the academic world, it’s failed to find backers among potential large-scale donors in the public or private sphere

Part of the reason could be because the main benefits of the proposal goes to those in the poor world. Pogge is quick to point out that there are real benefits for those in the rich world from preventing the spread of viruses globally but concedes that the Ecological Impact Fund’s gains would be more evenly shared.

The whole world has stake in limiting greenhouse gas emissions. 

Pogge says the EIF offers opportunities for countries like New Zealand to meet their Nationally Determined Contribution under the Paris Agreement at a lower cost than other offsetting programmes while delivering more tangible benefits to those most in need.

Treasury has estimated that the cost of offsetting New Zealand’s shortfall in meeting its NDC nationally will be between $3 billion and $24 billion.

When asked for an example of an innovation that might cut greenhouse gas emissions while improving the lives of those in the global south, Pogge suggests cooking stoves.

It’s an interesting example because the one country that claims to have started offsetting projects to meet its obligations under the Paris Agreement is Switzerland, and one of those projects involves woodburning cooking stoves in Peru.

A thousand ovens have been installed – each one estimated to offset 2.5 tonnes of CO2 annually. Switzerland plans to claim it has offset about 100,000 tonnes of CO2 for the period 2020 to 2030 with the installaion of the stoves.

At the current NZU price of $70 one of those stoves provides a return of $175 in terms of CO2 emissions avoided per year.

It should be noted that negotiations on what will be accepted as verified offsets under Article 6 of the Paris Agreement are yet to be finalised.

Personal transportation is another area Pogge thinks low tech solutions could pay big dividends. “Your know cheap e-scooters and e-bikes designed to be easily repaired.”

He says contributors to the EIF would get to claim a percentage of emissions avoided by the fund corresponded to their investments. And those investors could be either governments, like New Zealand, with obligations under the Paris Agreement or corporations wanting to offset their own emissions.

Pogge, who spent a year in New Zealand as a 17 year old, says Aotearoa is perfectly placed to lead the way on initiatives like the EIF.

“New Zealand can play quite an important role in the world by being a sounding board and launchpad for ideas.”

Norway, he says, is a good example of a small country having a big impact and New Zealand could have a similar impact by thinking outside the square.

“New Zealand is economically not a very large country and you might say that what New Zealand does domestically is sort of a drop in the bucket.

“But what New Zealand does on the international stage and the initiatives that it takes can have a profound impact on what happens in the world. And so if New Zealand were, for example, funding a pilot of the EIF at a cost of, say, one hundred million dollars, that could potentially have a world-changing impact and certainly a much larger impact than if New Zealand just did what everybody else is doing putting a little bit of money into well known development projects that everybody else is also funding,” he says.

The idea Pogge is pushing in Abu Dubai, and later this week in Shanghai to the New Development Bank, is to begin a pilot programme investing around $US100 million.

Initially the fund would limit eligible innovations to four or five different technologies in a limited number of countries – most likely in Africa.

The participating companies would be rewarded on the basis of emission reductions achieve. The new technologies would the set a new baselines with future rewards for savings beyond and above that. 

TÜV – a German measurement specialist – has looked at the proposal and concluded that it would be possible to measure the greenhouse gas emissions avoided. 

Pogge says he’s keen to hear from the incoming climate change minister and that for a tiny fraction of New Zealand’s Nationally Determined Contribution obligations, the country could make a real contribution by doing good and helping to mitigate the harm done by international patent laws.