This chapter explores the national landscape at UK and at Scottish level, which is relevant to climate change and to intellectual property, arguing that there is potential within these regimes for there to be conflict, and that this is not recognised or addressed at national level - which differs from the position seen at international level although gaps also remain there.

Building on the potential for conflict identified in Chapter 2, this chapter analyses the rationales and justifications for intellectual property and responses to climate change, and potential for conflict and alignment, and explores more deeply the lack of engagement with this conflict and alignment in national legislation and policy making at a UK level regarding and across intellectual property and climate change with particular reference to climate change and intellectual property litigation.

This chapter introduces a hypothetical scenario with case studies which evidence, at a practical level, the potential for different laws to be relevant to different ends across a set of facts and the prospect of different decisions being made to pursue different goals.

This chapter interrogates the case studies and how the facts and developments could be approached by different sets of laws, within existing possibilities for extension and creativity, and it argues that the outcomes reveal a deep division between public and private approaches to law and between legal fields, and that this can have negative consequences - black holes - for the delivery of goals which were pursued at national level, to deliver parallel international commitments.

Building on legal theory (in particular arguments for coherent and a Wild Law approach) and evolving approaches to statutory interpretation from a human rights perspective, this chapter develops new approaches to statutory interpretation through which courts could deliver new outcomes to the case study facts. A ProEarth approach to statutory interpretation and new hybrid action combining private and public causes of action building - a climate change Campbell - are introduced, yet this cannot address all black holes.

This chapter takes a more direct - though less immediate - approach to creating a new relationship between intellectual property and climate change. After considering and discounting new court rules and new courts (notably building on the National Green Tribunal in India), this chapter proposes substantive changes to existing national intellectual property and climate change legislation to deliver a more integrated framework. The chapter then creates new opportunities for courts to require sharing of IP rights if this is considered appropriate, irrespective of the starting point of the action. Finally, to reduce the prospect of conflicts continuing, this chapter proposes new processes for legislation and policy making to remove the barriers between fields of expertise and enable more holistic outcomes.

This chapter explores the risks and opportunities posed by investor-state dispute settlement to the solutions which have been developed for use at national level - another example of imbalance and barriers across different areas of law. After analysing the growth of and challenge to investor state dispute settlement, and the increasing place of IP and non-trade factors within it, this chapter proposes new model clauses for investor-state dispute settlements which would reduce the prospects of the national solutions being challenged from this new perspective.

This chapter reviews the arguments made in the book, provides suggestions for use of the book beyond intellectual property and climate change, and calls for lawyers, policy makers, legislators and activists to look across their fields and barriers and pursue these new possibilities.