A view of the closing session at the United Nations COP16 nature summit in Cali, Colombia, November 1, 2024.
| Photo Credit: Reuters

A UN nature summit agreed in Colombia on Saturday (November 2, 2024) on the creation of a fund to share the profits of digitally sequenced genetic data taken from animals and plants with the communities they come from.

Such data, much of it from species found in poor countries, is notably used in medicines and cosmetics that can make their developers billions.

Few, if any, benefits of the data — often downloaded from free-access online databases — ever trickle down to the communities who discovered a species’ usefulness in the first place.

The issue had been a bone of contention at the 16th Conference of Parties (COP16) to the UN’s Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) that opened in the Colombian city of Cali nearly two weeks ago.

The previous summit, COP15 in Montreal, had agreed on the creation of a “multilateral mechanism” for sharing the benefits of digitally sequenced genetic information – abbreviated as DSI – “including a global fund.”

But in Cali, negotiators argued for nearly two weeks over basic questions such as who pays, how much, into which fund, and to whom the money should go.

After a last-minute compromise, member countries of the CBD agreed on the creation of a “Cali Fund” for the equitable sharing of DSI benefits.

The agreement determines that users who commercially benefit from DSI “should contribute a proportion of their profits or revenue to the global fund.”

Those whose income exceeds a certain income threshold should contribute one percent of profits or 0.1 percent of revenue, the document determined.

The non-binding agreement lists targeted sectors including the producers of pharmaceuticals, food and health supplements, cosmetics, biotechnology and agribusiness.

UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres had urged delegates at the start of the talks to give the green light to a mechanism to govern DSI use so that benefits can be shared equitably.

“Developing countries are being plundered,” he said.

“Digitised DNA from biodiversity underpins scientific discoveries and economic growth. But developing countries don’t gain fairly from these advances — despite being home to extraordinary richness,” he said.

Programmed to close on Friday, the summit ran many hours into overtime as delegates quarreled over minutiae of text.

Many delegates had already left the conference by the time the deal was adopted, rushing to catch planes back home.