As COP31 advances climate technology and finance, Bangladesh’s farmer-led innovations raise questions about knowledge ownership, recognition and equitable technology transfer.
In the drought-prone Barind Tract of northwestern Bangladesh, a farmer turned his own mud house into a laboratory. His name is Nur Mohammad. From Gollapara village in Tanore, Rajshahi, and educated up to class ten, he began experimenting with rice because drought was destroying crops across the Barind. Over years of observation, selection and experimentation, he developed short-duration rice varieties that require less irrigation and can be harvested within a shorter growing period. The varieties are still awaiting formal recognition as registered varieties.
The story is striking not because a farmer became an inventor. It is striking because it forces us to reconsider what we mean by a “climate technology”.When the international climate regime talks about technology development and transfer, the conversation often evokes laboratories, patents, sophisticated equipment, digital systems and commercially developed technologies. But a drought-resistant crop developed through years of farmer experimentation is also a response to climate stress. So is a locally adapted seed conserved by a community. So is an agricultural practice refined through generations of observation. The question, therefore, is not simply whether the Global South needs climate technology. It is also this: Who gets to define what counts as climate technology? And behind that question lies another, more uncomfortable one: Who owns the climate solution?
The farmer as an innovator
Bangladesh has more examples. Haripada Kapali, a farmer from Jhenaidah, became known for developing Haridhan, a rice variety that emerged from his selection and experimentation outside a formal agricultural research station. The variety spread among farmers and became associated with his name.
These stories should not be romanticised. Formal agricultural science, plant breeding institutions and scientific validation remain essential. Not every farmer experiment becomes a viable variety, and not every traditional practice is automatically suitable for wider application.
But something important is nevertheless being revealed. Innovation does not always begin inside a laboratory. Sometimes it begins in a field. Sometimes it begins with a farmer asking why one plant survives while another fails. Sometimes it begins with a woman preserving a seed that her community considers too valuable to lose. Sometimes it begins with drought, heat, excessive rain or declining soil fertility forcing people to experiment with what they already have. This matters enormously in a warming world. Climate change is not an abstract future for farmers in the Global South. It is already changing growing seasons, water availability, crop choices and the risks attached to agricultural production. Those living with these changes are not only vulnerable people waiting for solutions. They are also producing solutions.
The technology transfer question
The international climate regime has recognised technology development and transfer as a central part of climate action for years. Under the UNFCCC’s Technology Mechanism, countries have continued to negotiate how climate technologies can be developed, transferred and implemented, particularly in developing countries. Technology-related negotiations will again be considered at COP31 in Antalya in November 2026.
COP30 in Belém also produced the Belém Technology Implementation Programme, designed to strengthen support for technology priorities identified by developing countries, strengthen national innovation systems, build capacity and mobilise financial and non-financial resources for implementation.
This is an important shift from simply talking about technology to thinking about implementation. But implementation raises a deeper question.
Whose innovation systems are we talking about?
If national innovation systems include universities, research institutes, technology companies and laboratories, should they also include farmers’ fields, community seed banks and local knowledge networks? If the answer is yes, then the idea of technology transfer needs to become much broader. Technology does not always have to travel from a laboratory in the Global North to a field in the Global South. Sometimes it travels horizontally from farmer to farmer, village to village, community to community. Sometimes it emerges from the South itself.
A different direction of technology transfer
Imagine two different pathways. In the first, a technology is developed by a company or research institution, protected through intellectual property, financed through international mechanisms and transferred to a developing country. In the second, a farmer develops a drought-adapted variety, shares its seed with neighbouring farmers, and the knowledge spreads through social networks. Both involve innovation. Both can contribute to adaptation. But they do not receive the same institutional recognition. This is where climate justice intersects with knowledge justice. A farmer innovator may not have a patent lawyer. A community seed bank may not have an intellectual-property department. A woman who has conserved dozens of crop varieties may not have a research publication. Yet their knowledge can have enormous practical value. The international climate system needs to ask whether its current language and funding structures are sufficiently capable of recognising such forms of innovation.
When knowledge becomes a resource
There is another reason this question is becoming urgent. Agricultural knowledge is no longer confined to fields and villages. It can be documented, digitised, mapped and incorporated into databases. Genetic resources can be studied scientifically. Traditional knowledge can become associated with research and technological development. Once knowledge enters a formal technological system, its relationship with intellectual property becomes much more complicated. The World Intellectual Property Organization has recognised this problem for years. In May 2024, WIPO member states adopted the Treaty on Intellectual Property, Genetic Resources and Associated Traditional Knowledge. Among other things, the treaty establishes a patent-disclosure requirement concerning the origin or source of genetic resources and associated traditional knowledge when claimed inventions are based on them, subject to the treaty’s conditions. WIPO: Treaty on IP, Genetic Resources and Associated Traditional Knowledge This is significant because agricultural crops are themselves genetic resources, and traditional knowledge associated with them can contribute to research and innovation. WIPO: Genetic Resources and Traditional Knowledge But disclosure is not the same thing as ownership. Naming the source of knowledge does not automatically answer the question of who should benefit from its use. Nor does it resolve every question surrounding consent, control, access or commercialisation. That is why the climate technology debate cannot be separated from the broader politics of knowledge.
The new colonial question
This is where I believe the idea of a “new colonialism” deserves serious examination. Colonialism was not only about territorial control. It was also deeply connected to the extraction of resources, knowledge and value. Today, knowledge can be extracted without physical occupation. A seed can be collected. A traditional practice can be documented. An agricultural innovation can be digitised. A genetic resource can become research material. A community’s ecological knowledge can become data. An algorithm can process that data. A commercial technology can eventually emerge from it. The question is not whether all such processes are exploitative. They are not. The question is whether the people and communities who generate, conserve or improve the underlying knowledge have meaningful recognition, participation and benefit-sharing when that knowledge enters wider technological and commercial systems. That is a legitimate climate-governance question. It is also an environmental-law question.
From farmer knowledge to climate finance
This discussion has implications for climate finance as well. If adaptation finance is intended to strengthen resilience in developing countries, then funding should not be limited to importing technologies. It should also help identify, test, document and scale locally generated innovations. A farmer who has developed a drought-tolerant crop should have a pathway to scientific validation. A community seed bank should be recognised as part of a local adaptation system. Farmer-to-farmer learning should be considered alongside conventional extension. Local innovators should have access to technical institutions without having to surrender control over their knowledge simply to enter the formal system. This would not mean replacing science with traditional knowledge. It would mean creating a more democratic relationship between different knowledge systems.
COP31 needs to look beyond the usual technology map
COP31 is approaching at a time when climate technology itself is changing rapidly. The current COP31 agenda includes technology-related implementation, and Türkiye has also placed technology and investment alongside practical climate implementation. Recent COP31 preparations have additionally highlighted areas such as AI and clean technologies, food security and the connection between technology and finance. Reuters: COP31 agenda and technology priorities This makes the question even more urgent. As climate policy becomes increasingly technological, the world must be careful not to create a system in which the communities most affected by climate change become merely consumers of technologies designed elsewhere. The Global South should not be seen only as a destination for climate technologies. It is also a source of innovation. Its farmers are experimenting. Its communities are adapting. Its seed keepers are conserving diversity. Its local knowledge holders are observing ecological changes that formal monitoring systems may not capture. The challenge is to connect these forms of knowledge with scientific research, public institutions, climate finance and appropriate technologies without extracting them from the communities that created and maintained them.
Who owns the climate solution?
The farmer in Tanore may never sit at a COP negotiating table. Haripada Kapali never did. Yet the questions raised by their experiences belong inside the climate negotiations. The problem is that the people who live with the consequences of climate change—and who are often developing practical solutions in response to it remain underrepresented in the rooms where those solutions are debated, financed and defined. A climate regime shaped largely without the direct voices of farmers risks treating them as beneficiaries of technology when, in many cases, they are already its innovators. What is a technology? Who is an inventor? Whose knowledge counts? Who decides which solutions receive finance? Who owns the knowledge behind a solution? And who benefits when that solution travels beyond the community where it was developed? These are not peripheral questions. They go to the heart of climate justice. At COP31, governments will discuss how to accelerate technology development and transfer. The world certainly needs faster climate action. But speed should not come at the cost of recognition. If the climate crisis demands innovation from everyone, then the global climate regime must also learn to recognise innovation wherever it emerges. Sometimes the next climate technology may come from a laboratory in a major city. Sometimes it may come from a university. And sometimes, as the fields of the Barind remind us, it may begin with a farmer, a handful of seeds and a question that nobody else thought worth asking.
Md Shahidul Islam is an anthropologist, environmental law researcher and Regional Coordinator at BARCIK-Barind Tract, Bangladesh, working on climate justice, agroecology, food sovereignty and traditional knowledge.
