UN summit agrees deal on genetic data but fails on wider finance to protect nature

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Pharmaceutical and a host of other companies will be expected to voluntarily pay into a new fund covering their use of genetic data, the UN COP16 biodiversity summit agreed, but countries failed to reach a wider agreement on global finance for nature after talks ran overtime and were suspended.

The two-week long meeting in Cali, Colombia, of about 190 countries, sister to the UN’s climate summit, was expected to advance goals to halt the decline of nature by 2030 agreed two years ago in Montreal when they last met.

But negotiators ended a marathon final plenary session that went through the night on Friday and most of Saturday without a resolution on finance to support the goal of protecting nature.

A drop in the number of national delegates to below the 130 needed for a quorum, as those who had flights to catch left the summit, forced Colombian environment minister and COP16 president Susana Muhamad to suspend the session. It has not yet been decided when or where it will resume.

Colombian Environment Minister and COP16 President, Susana Muhamad, suspended the talks scheduled to end Friday but which ran overnight and into Saturday, as delegates began to leave for the airport. © AFP via Getty Images

“The meeting is not over — COP16 has not been closed, because we haven’t been through all the agenda items or adopted the [closing] report,” said David Ainsworth, speaking for the secretariat of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity, under which COP16 was held. “The parties now have to come up with another date and venue to conclude it.”

He stressed, however, that the agenda items already adopted were officially operative after being “approved by the convention”, whose parties include every UN member state except the US and the Holy See.

This included the measure for a separate fund for corporate payments for the use of genetic data from nature, which proved one of the most contentious issues. Disagreements came from countries including India and Switzerland.

Companies in industries such as pharma, cosmetics and agricultural technology presently enjoy free and extensive access to this data, which is typically collected by academic researchers and made available through publicly funded open-source databases.

The new multilateral mechanism would be funded by commercial users of so-called “digital sequence information”. The deal was in response to demands from biodiversity-rich developing nations that companies pay a share of their income from products developed using this data.

Companies in sectors that “directly or indirectly benefit” from the use of this data “should contribute” to the new fund 0.1 per cent of their revenue or 1 per cent of their profit, “as an indicative rate”, it was agreed.

Those companies which meet two out of three criteria, of $20mn in assets, $50mn in sales or $5mn in profit, were expected to fulfil the requirement.

A contribution of 0.1 per cent of revenue would have meant a $67mn payment last year from Switzerland’s Roche, the biggest non-US pharma company by sales, alone.

Expert observers to the negotiations noted that the use of the word “should”, rather than “shall”, meant that these would essentially be voluntary contributions by companies, rather than the mandatory levy that some countries had been pushing for.

They added, however, that the multinational agreement could create significant moral and reputational pressure on companies to comply.

The text also “invited” governments to take legislative or other measures to “incentivise contributions” from companies, opening the door to potential mandatory requirements.

The International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers and Associations hit out at the decision, saying it “does not get the balance right between the intended benefits of such a mechanism and the significant costs to society and science that it has the potential to create”. Director-general David Reddy said the data was “essential for developing new medicines and vaccines”.

COP16 also agreed to create a new body focused on the rights and interests of indigenous peoples.

Smaller developing nations had felt they were in an unequal contest as the conference entered its long final days © AFP via Getty Images

But there was no agreement on the governance systems around international biodiversity finance. In Montreal, nations had agreed to increase total finance for nature protection and restoration to $200bn a year by 2030, with wealthy nations providing an annual $30bn in support for developing ones by the same date. To support this, nations agreed to a new fund under the Washington-based Global Environment Facility.

At COP16, however, developing nations voiced concern that the GEF was too heavily influenced by the rich nations, and called for the creation of a new fund with governance that better reflected the priorities of all nations.

Countries also failed to reach consensus on monitoring and assessment to hold nations accountable on their official pledges for nature protection and restoration.

“The suspension of the COP without any agreed-upon finance strategy is alarming,” said Brian O’Donnell, director of the non-profit Campaign for Nature. “Failure to make progress on finance in the face of unprecedented biodiversity loss keeps the world on the path to nature loss and species extinction.”

Panama’s special representative for climate change, Juan Carlos Monterrey, said smaller developing nations had felt they were in an unequal contest as the conference entered its long final days.

“Small delegations from vulnerable countries are just there with a few negotiators — we have to stay awake for 36 hours, whereas [larger economies] have someone freshly showered in clean clothes at least twice a day,” he said. “The process isn’t fair to begin with.”