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International trade reduces emissions through technology transfer led by key emitters

Nature Climate Change (2026)Cite this article

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Abstract

The Paris Agreement highlights technology transfer for climate mitigation, yet the disparities in technology ownership and diffusion slow global decarbonization. While trade agreements serve as institutional pathways for technological diffusion, the decarbonization potential of patent transfers remains unassessed. Here using data on carbon emissions, trade and patents from 1995 to 2023, we evaluate how membership in trade agreements influences global carbon emission through technological accumulation. Our analyses show that while trade agreements have heterogeneous effects on emissions, they lead to a robust 2.8% reduction among key emitters. These reductions are mediated more by cross-border general technology transfers than by specific climate innovation. Scenario analyses further suggest that full technology transferring from key emitters to all their partners could reduce emissions by 587 Mt, equivalent to 1.6% of global emissions in 2021. These results demonstrate that incorporating technology transfer mechanisms into trade agreements is critical for maximizing their decarbonization potential.

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Fig. 1: The temporal CO2 emission of trade agreements and key countries.
Fig. 2: Effect of agreement and mediation effect of technology on emissions.
Fig. 3: Heterogeneous effects and technology transfer patterns.
Fig. 4: Potential carbon reductions under three technology scenarios.

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Data availability

This study uses data from several sources. Country-level CO2 emissions are obtained from OWID (https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions); macroeconomic indicators such as GDP and population are from the World Bank WDI (https://datacatalog.worldbank.org/search/dataset/0037712/World-Development-Indicators) and information on trade agreements is sourced from the World Bank DTA database (https://datatopics.worldbank.org/dta/table.html). Bilateral trade flows are retrieved from the UN Comtrade database (https://comtradeplus.un.org/) and climate patent records are from IncoPat (https://www.incopat.com/). Owing to license restrictions from the providers, the raw trade and patent data cannot be shared. The data necessary to reproduce the main results are available via Figshare at https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.31295878 (ref. 48).

Code availability

MATLAB R2022b was used for data processing and visualization. The analysis for impact of agreements and technology is conducted using Stata 18. To facilitate reproducibility, the full data processing and analysis codes are available via CodeOcean at https://doi.org/10.24433/CO.1738407.v1 (ref. 50).

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Acknowledgements

J.B. acknowledges support from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) (grant no. 72488101). P.W. acknowledges support from the NSFC (grant no. 42477499). L.H. acknowledges support from the NSFC (grant no. 42377420). P.W. acknowledges support from the Natural Science Foundation of Jiangsu Province (grant no. BK20231327).

Author information

Author notes

  1. These authors contributed equally: Jiaming Wang, Peng Wang.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. State Key Laboratory of Water Pollution Control and Green Resource Recycling, School of the Environment, Nanjing University, Nanjing, China

    Jiaming Wang, Peng Wang, Yangyang Wu, Futian Ren, Jun Bi & Lei Huang

  2. Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong, China

    Jiaming Wang, Shu-Chien Hsu & Yangyang Wu

  3. Basic Science Center for Energy and Climate Change, Beijing, China

    Jiaming Wang, Jun Bi & Lei Huang

  4. Faculty of Civil Engineering and Mechanics, Jiangsu University, Zhenjiang, China

    Peng Wang

  5. School of Earth and Environmental Sciences, Cardiff University, Cardiff, UK

    Pan He

  6. School of Energy and Environment, Anhui University of Technology, Maanshan, China

    Yiyi Wang

  7. State Key Laboratory of Water Pollution Control and Green Resource Recycling, College of Environmental Science and Engineering, Tongji University, Shanghai, China

    Wenhai Chu

  8. Institute for the Environment and Health, Nanjing University, Suzhou, China

    Jun Bi

  9. School of Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences, University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK

    Yuli Shan

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Contributions

J.W., P.W. and L.H. designed the study. J.W. wrote the codes and led the analyses and visualization. S.-C.H., P.H., Y. Wu and Y.S. contributed to framing the paper. J.W., P.W. and L.H. drafted the paper. J.W., P.W., S.-C.H., P.H., Y. Wu, F.R., Y. Wang, W.C., J.B., L.H. and Y.S. contributed to writing, editing and improving the paper. L.H. and P.W. supervised and coordinated the overall research.

Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Peng Wang or Lei Huang.

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Nature Climate Change thanks Shaikh Eskander, Cuihong Yang and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Wang, J., Wang, P., Hsu, SC. et al. International trade reduces emissions through technology transfer led by key emitters. Nat. Clim. Chang. (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-026-02595-z

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