Two years after setting ambitious goals for saving habitat and species by 2030, delegates at a United Nations biodiversity summit that concluded in Cali, Colombia, last week largely failed to agree on how to increase funding for nature-rich countries. “[T]he sense of urgency was found more in speeches than actions,” Susan Lieberman, vice president of international policy at the Wildlife Conservation Society, said in a statement. But in a move widely welcomed in the conservation community, Indigenous people and local communities were given a formal role in helping set the agenda for the group, called the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD).
Many advocates for nature conservation are concerned that progress has been too slow on the CBD, which was adopted by 196 countries in 1992 in a bid to ensure the conservation and sustainable use of biological diversity. Only about half of member nations have provided plans for how they will meet the 2030 goals. It’s also not clear where funding will come from for conservation actions, such as protecting nature reserves and compensating farmers for nature-friendly agricultural practices.
At the last convention in 2022, delegates from 190 nations pledged to spend $200 billion per year on conservation. Part of this year’s discussions centered on devising an overall strategy for raising and dispersing this cash. But the delegates failed to agree on a plan. One issue was whether to create a new organization to handle the funding, or leave it to the Global Environment Facility, a multilateral collection of funds created in 1991.
Negotiators did approve a small piece of this puzzle: a plan for raising conservation funds from companies that create products using genetic information taken from nature, known as digital sequence information (DSI). Many nature-rich nations in the tropics and elsewhere have long objected to companies creating new drugs or crop varieties based on specimens collected from their countries without sharing any of the profits. These concerns have been intensified by the advent of molecular biology and genomics, which make it possible to develop biotech products informed by genetic data alone.
The new plan addresses that problem by laying out a framework in which companies that use DSI to develop products, such as those in the pharmaceutical, food, cosmetics, and biotechnology industries, should donate 0.1% of their revenue or 1% of profits, if their revenue or assets exceed certain thresholds. If all companies comply, this DSI fund could raise more than $1 billion annually, according to an estimate from the London School of Economics. But it’s not clear how much it will generate because the final agreement only asks industries for voluntary contributions, instead of making them mandatory as some nations wanted.
Amber Hartman Scholz, head of the science policy group at the Leibniz Institute’s German Collection of Microorganisms and Cell Cultures GmbH, says the final DSI agreement is good for science. “It has everything that we were fighting for,” says the microbiologist, who co-founded the DSI Scientific Network, which advocates at the CBD on behalf of scientists. One of the group’s goals was to make sure that a benefit-sharing system did not create red tape or new costs for research.
Public institutions such as universities and nonprofit research institutes will not be required to contribute money when they develop methods or products based on DSI. But the final agreement states such institutions are expected to share “nonmonetary benefits.” The details will be hashed out over the next 2 years; they could include transferring technology to nature-rich nations and helping them develop their own capacity for research and conservation.
Firms that use DSI, and the industry groups that represent them, are watching closely. The International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers and Associations warns of “significant costs to society and science.” The International Chamber of Commerce calls the agreement a “starting basis” but says the system will need to be simple, affordable, and offer legal certainty before many businesses will opt to participate.
If funds are raised through the plan, at least half of the money should go to conservation needs identified by Indigenous people and local communities, the agreement states. This year’s summit also led to the creation of an advisory body to represent the interests and concerns of those groups at the CBD itself.
“We are very excited. This is definitely a step forward in the recognition of the rights of Indigenous peoples and local communities,” says Adamu Adija of the International Indigenous Forum on Biodiversity. “It is also a recognition of our knowledge and how it contributes to biodiversity conservation.”
This is a “strong outcome,” says Thomas Brooks, chief scientist of the International Union for Conservation of Nature. “Many of the decisions that affect maintenance of nature lie in the hands of people living closest to wild nature.”
