Trend and Priority Change of Climate Change Mitigation Technology in the Global Mining Sector

The purpose of this work is to explore the most relevant driving factors for innovation in the mining, mineral processing and metals sectors related to climate change mitigation technology. In order to do so, we use a decomposition analysis based on the logarithmic mean Divisia index to analyze the trends in patent families related to climate change mitigation technology filled by organizations or individuals in the mining, mineral processing and metals sectors. collected from the Orbis IP patent database between 2001 and 2016. We observed that three different factors, namely the PRIORITY of climate change mitigation technology; the overall relevance of the MINING, mineral processing and metals sector; and the SCALE of patent families have a different impact in different countries and country groups, depending on whether the mining and minerals sector play a strong role in their economy or whether they are a developed or developing country. Two shortcomings of this work are: we were not able to address the fact that some authors question the use of patent applications as a proxy for investments in R&D, and we did not analyze the shifts in innovation patterns from companies. Nonetheless, our findings encourage policy recommendations reported by other authors, especially with regards to the economic development of poorer countries, technology transfer and coordination between innovation stakeholders