CALI, Colombia – In the face of extreme and accelerating wildlife decline, government officials in nearly every country have agreed from A groundbreaking new covenant To funnel more money and other resources to conservation, especially in poorer regions of the world.
If it works, the deal — finalized on a Saturday morning The United Nations Conference on Biodiversity — known as COP16 — could raise tens of millions of dollars, or perhaps more than $1 billion, each year to protect the environment.
The deal is designed to draw money from a new and somewhat unusual source: companies that use wild animal DNA to make and sell products like drugs and cosmetics. Today a large number of databases store this type of genetic data — taken from plants, animals and microbes around the world — and make it available for use by anyone, including companies. Corporations in various industries use this genetic data, known as digital sequence information (DSI), to find and develop commercial products. Moderna, for example, used Hundreds of genetic sequences To rapidly develop a Covid-19 vaccine from various respiratory viruses. Moderna generated more than that $30 billion Sales from vaccines.
“It is absolutely, 100 percent clear that companies benefit from biodiversity,” Amber Scholz, a scientist at the Leibniz Institute DSMZ, a German research organization, told Vox.
This new plan is to share some of those benefits with nature. It says big companies and other companies that rely on DNA sequences — such as pharmaceuticals, biotechnology and food supplements — should keep a stake. profit or revenue In a fund called Cali Fund. As planned, that part is 1 percent of profit or 0.1 percent of revenue, Although this leaves some wiggle room and is open to revision. This view draws heavily from research at the London School of Economics.
New Cali Fund, Administered by the UN, it will go towards conservation of biodiversity — all the genetic information from which the plants and animals derive. It will distribute money to countries based on how much wildlife they have and how much genetic data they are generating. According to the plan, at least half of the money is to help indigenous and local communities, especially in low-income parts of the world. The exact formula of how the money will be shared will be decided later.
“This is a global opportunity for people who benefit from nature to be able to quickly and easily put some money where it’s really going to make a difference in nature conservation,” William Lockhart, a UK government official who co-led talks on the new plan, told Vox on Friday.
Notably, the new plan is the only international instrument that finances conservation almost entirely with private sector money, Lockhart said.
“It will change people’s lives,” Flora Mokgohlo, a South African government negotiator, told Vox Friday, explaining how the plan could finance local communities that harbor biodiversity.
In some ways this new plan is meant to redress long-standing power imbalances, said Shiva Thambisetty, associate professor of intellectual property law at the London School of Economics. Many of the world’s biodiversity hotspots are in developing countries, such as the Democratic Republic of Congo, yet many of the companies that benefit from that biodiversity are located in rich countries.
“It’s about righting an injustice,” Thambisetty said. “Several biodiverse countries are alienated from the value of their resources.”
“It’s a big deal,” he said of the plan, when it was in draft form.
There are still many unknowns, including how much money this process could ultimately make and how enforceable it will be. The agreement was reached at the end of COP16, a meeting of about 180 world governments that are party to a global environmental treaty called the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). While that agreement is legally binding, this new plan — a “decision” in the language of the agreement — is not So until countries incorporate the decision into their own laws, It will be difficult to implement. (Some countries already have laws governing access to their genetic data. It is not yet clear how such laws will work alongside the new global approach.)
What’s more is that the United States, the world’s largest economy, is one of only two countries that is not a member of the CBD Treaty. The other is the Vatican. This means American companies may have less of an incentive to follow this new plan and pay fees for using DNA extracted from wild organisms.
Some advocates for low-income countries are unhappy with the plan, saying it doesn’t do enough to address the problem of what they call biopiracy. Companies then commercialize biodiversity, including DNA, and fail to share the benefits — including profits — arising from those resources with the communities that protect them. The plan undermines a country’s ability to control who can use its genetic resources, said Nithin Ramakrishnan, a senior researcher at the Third World Network, a group that advocates for human rights and benefit-sharing. “You’re just creating a voluntary fund that promotes biopiracy,” he said.
Still, the decision — which often resulted in hours of discussion over single words — still has a lot of power, experts told Vox. Many companies, and especially those with international operations, will likely pay the fee, or a portion of it, they said, even if they are located in the United States. Because they operate in regions like the European Union, where this new plan will likely be respected. “Big companies are very involved here,” said Scholz, who is based in Germany. “They have a significant reputational risk.”
Basecamp Research, a London-based startup that claims to operate the world’s largest database of non-human genetic sequences, wasn’t worried about the potential fees. “We are quite comfortable and willing to contribute,” said Bupe Mwambingu, the company’s biodiversity partnership manager. “It’s going towards conserving biodiversity, which is the resource we’re using for our business.” (It is not clear whether Basecamp would be obligated to pay research fees under this new plan.)
Early reactions from the pharmaceutical industry suggest it’s not thrilled. On Saturday morning, International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers and Associations Director General David Reddy said in a statement.statementThat the new plan “could not strike a balance” between the potential “costs” to “society and science”.
“Any new system should not introduce more conditions on how scientists access such data and add regulations, taxation and other obligations to a complex web for the entire R&D ecosystem – including academia and biotech companies,” he said.
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Even in a best-case scenario, money isn’t likely to flow into the Cali fund for years, Scholz said. And it won’t have much—certainly nothing close to $700 billion a year to prevent biodiversity loss.
But aside from the money it could make, this new plan hints at something important: companies and scientists in rich regions should share the benefits they derive from nature. Even if it is collected from digital DNA.
Want to go deeper? Check out our interpreter About digital sequence information and how it is used.
