Foreword
Five years ago, we set out to answer a simple question with a rigorous lens: what can patent data tell us about the world’s real progress towards a sustainable economy?
As scientists at heart and IP attorneys by training, we wanted to move past the headlines and track the signal - not the noise - of meaningful change. Patents are not perfect proxies for innovation, but used carefully they are powerful indicators of where time, talent and capital are being committed. Over five editions, that approach has allowed us to separate short-lived hype from durable progress and to watch trajectories unfold across countries, companies, and technologies.
This year’s report lands at an important moment. In September 2025, the UK’s Deputy Prime Minister told the UN Climate Summit that COP30 “must be a turning point,” reaffirming the UK’s Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC) to cut greenhouse-gas emissions by at least eighty-one percent by 2035 versus 1990, economy-wide and aligned to keeping 1.5°C in reach. The Deputy Prime Minister also underlined a point we see echoed in the data: green innovation and economic growth can move together.
Five years of consistent, comparable analysis of technologies has allowed us to separate snapshots of innovation from momentum. In that time, we’ve seen when a dip reflects a maturing, product-ready technology rather than a decline (a lesson from past solar trends); and we’ve seen how policy shifts correlate with surges in filings across multiple territories, signalling a genuine commercial response rather than a localised spike. Above all, we see growth: most curves point upward across many technologies and many geographies, which is precisely what you would hope to see in a robust transition.
How our coverage has evolved
We’ve always organised the report to be accessible while remaining technically grounded.
Last year, our analysis spanned Energy (hydrogen, nuclear, batteries), Transport (aerospace, automotive), Materials (bioplastics, plastics recycling, carbon capture), and Food (gene editing in agriculture; alternative protein including cultivated, plant-based, and insect protein).
This year we’ve added an AI domain, broadened out some key areas and followed the data into important downstream and enabling areas:
- Energy: Batteries, Wind
- AI: Power management for AI data centres, and AI & automation in aerospace
- Materials: Biodegradable & compostable materials (including Bioplastics and Packaging Materials), Sustainable chemical feedstocks (including Plastic Recycling, Agricultural Waste, and Biomass), and Decarbonisation of key industries (Ammonia and Methanol)
- Food: Alternative protein, including Plant-based meat, Cultivated meat, and Insect protein
This year there has been particular shift in the materials domain – broadening out from bioplastics to other biodegradable and compostable technologies, and similarly for plastic recycling and carbon capture - taking a wider look at the sustainable chemical feedstocks landscape.
For hydrogen, we’ve moved downstream into decarbonising key chemical feedstocks such as ammonia and methanol - where innovation (and the application of upstream innovation, such as green hydrogen) and investment can reduce the footprint of colossal, globally integrated industries.
We’ve also added two new AI-focused sections – power management for AI data centres and AI & automation in aerospace. OpenAI announced that ChatGPT has reached 800M+ weekly users as of October 2025, and a typical single generative AI prompt can use 10 to 100 times the energy of a simple internet (e.g. Google) search. Together, these trends create a clear opportunity that innovators are capitalising on to manage data-centre energy more effectively for large environmental gains. In aerospace, we’re also seeing a tangible surge in AI-driven control, optimisation, and automation, reshaping core systems and accelerating sustainability efforts; accordingly, our aerospace lens this year is deliberately more AI-centric.
Food remains a story of promise meeting practical scale-up. The plant-based meat sector is striving to match customer requirements with economically viable offerings; cultivated meat is still working through technical, regulatory, and cost hurdles; insect protein continues to attract targeted innovation, particularly where it plugs naturally into waste-to-value ecosystems.
The UK has called for COP30 to be the point where the world course-corrects and accelerates, continuing to build on the momentum generated by the 2015 Paris Agreement whose impact is still visible in patent-filing data today. If that is to happen, it will be delivered through countless specific advances – new catalysts, smarter control systems, better process routes, more circular materials, tighter integration between digital infrastructure and energy systems. The filings we track each year are the breadcrumb trail of that work. Our aim, once again, is to follow that trail carefully and share what it reveals.
We at Appleyard Lees hope you enjoy the report.
Chris Mason Partner