A new global fund for conservation seeks to make corporations share part of their profits of benefiting from using genetic data from animals, plants or microorganisms in nature.
Named the Cali Fund, the new finance mechanism was born out of the recently concluded United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity summit, or COP16, held in Cali, Colombia. The fund is expected to raise up to $1 billion yearly for conserving biodiversity. Half of the amount in the U.N.-controlled fund is expected to go to Indigenous peoples and local communities either directly or through national governments.
Mongabay contributor Justin Catanoso reported from COP16 that countries had agreed that companies in sectors such as pharmaceuticals, biotech and cosmetics, which profit from biodiversity, “should” contribute 1% of profits or 0.1% or revenue linked to their use of genetic information from nature, also called digital sequence information (DSI).
Companies like Moderna, the U.S. pharma giant that used DSI from hundreds of respiratory viruses to develop its COVID-19 vaccine, agreed in principle to pay as long as the fees are voluntary, which some COP16 attendees reacted negatively to, Catanaso reported.
Some DSI experts also raised concerns that the use of the term “should” not only means the fund is voluntary but also that the payment rates are “indicative,” according to Carbon Brief.
“If you acknowledge the biodiversity crisis as a user of DSI, [and] you acknowledge that you depend on biodiversity for your own organization, [then] you should also agree that protecting that biodiversity takes money,” Georgina Chandler, head of policy for the Zoological Society of London, told Mongabay. “Voluntary contributions simply won’t add up.”
If the Cali Fund had been in effect during the COVID-19 pandemic, Moderna would have paid $30 million out of the total $30 billion it made in vaccine sales, Catanoso reported.
Carbon Brief also noted concerns that some industries, like agribusiness, could be lobbying for exemption from the global fund.
Half of the fund is meant to go directly to Indigenous peoples and local communities for their needs, either through governments or through institutions identified by these groups, according to a U.N. statement. The statement added that developing countries will benefit from the fund and can use it to implement the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (KMGBF), aimed at halting or reversing biodiversity loss.
Neville Ash, director of the U.N. Environment Programme’s World Conservation Monitoring Centre, said in an interview that with the Cali Fund set up, “countries will put in place national measures to incentivize payments from large companies, and there will be a process leading up to [the next biodiversity summit] to further determine some of the details of the mechanism.”
This includes a summary of “COP16 biodiversity meeting recap: Progress made, but finance lags” by Justin Catanoso.
Banner image of a coral reef in Indonesia by Rhett A. Butler/Mongabay.
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