Cali, Colombia:

Much of the vanilla that flavors our ice cream today is artificial, derived from the genetic signature of a plant that hundreds of years ago was known only to an Indigenous Mexican tribe. The plant’s sequenced genomic information, available on public databases, was used as the basis for a synthetic flavoring that today competes with vanilla grown in several countries, mainly by small-scale farmers.

Few, if any, benefits of the lucrative scientific advance have trickled down to the communities that gave us vanilla in the first place.

“Wild genetic resources and pharmaceuticals …are multi-multi-billion dollar businesses. They clearly are profitable… that’s not in dispute,” Charles Barber of the World Resources Institute think tank told AFP.

“A great deal of really valuable information has fed into the system from research and utilization of wild genetic resources. And there is no mechanism currently to compensate the people where this information is coming from” in the form of digitally sequenced data, he added.

Much of the information comes from poor countries.

Fair sharing of the gains derived from digitally-stored genetic sequencing data has been a headache for negotiators at the COP16 biodiversity summit into its second week in Cali, Colombia.

At the last conference, in Montreal in 2022, 196 country parties to the UN’s Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) agreed to create a benefit-sharing mechanism for the use of digital sequence information (DSI).

Two years later, they still need to resolve such basic questions as who pays, how much, into which fund, and to whom does the money go?

‘Cheap and very fast’

The issue is a complex one.

There is little debate that genetic data-sharing on mostly free-access platforms is crucial for human advancement through medicine and vaccine development, for example.

But how to quantify the value of the sequenced information itself? And should the first people to discover a plant’s particular usefulness be compensated?

“Sequencing technology has become so advanced that you can go with a… handheld device a little bit bigger than a cell phone and you can literally sequence a genome in an hour or two and upload it as you sequence it,” Pierre du Plessis, a DSI expert and former negotiator for African countries at the CBD told AFP.

These gene sequences are then uploaded to databases which artificial intelligence can mine for potential leads for product development.

DSI is worth an estimated hundreds of billions of dollars a year. And there is a lot of it out there.

“Once the sequence is put into a public database, generally, no benefit-sharing obligations apply,” Nithin Ramakrishnan, a researcher with the Third World Network, an advocacy NGO for developing countries, told AFP in Cali.

“Like when the sandalwood sequence information is available in the database whether India wants to share its sandalwood… with a cosmetic company or not, doesn’t matter.

Mandatory

A point of contention in Cali is a demand from developing countries that payment for DSI use be mandatory, perhaps through a one-percent levy on profits from drugs, cosmetics or other products.

They also want guarantees of non-monetary benefits such as access to vaccines produced from genetic information sequenced from viruses and other pathogens.

“We want real understanding, sector-specific understanding of what non-monetary benefits will be shared and we want the system to be obligatory — the users should have some form of obligation to share benefits,” said Ramakrishnan.

Another sticking point is access for Indigenous people and local communities to DSI funds.

Developing countries want the information on genetic databases to be traceable and “answerable to governments” of the countries where it comes from, said Ramakrishnan.

But rich nations and many researchers oppose such a model which they fear will be too onerous, potentially putting the brakes on scientific pursuits that could benefit all humankind.

With such divergent points of view, observers are doubtful the Cali COP will emerge with any firm decisions on the outstanding questions by closing time on Friday.

The World Wildlife Fund has said “many more rounds of negotiations appear necessary” on DSI.

Added Barber: “I think it’s not going to all get solved here.”

(This story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)

Cali:

The experts’ assessment is clear: humans are the major threat to Earth’s land, seas and all the living things they shelter, including ourselves.

The COP16 biodiversity summit in Cali, Colombia, enters its second week Monday to assess, and ramp up, progress towards achieving 23 targets agreed in Canada two years ago to halt and reverse nature destruction by 2030.

The science in numbers:

2/3 of oceans degraded

Three-quarters of Earth’s surface has already been significantly altered and two-thirds of oceans degraded by humankind’s rapacious consumption, according to the IPBES intergovernmental science and policy body on biodiversity.

Globally, over a third of inland wetlands declined from 1970 to 2015 — a rate three times that of forest loss.

“Land degradation through human activities is undermining the well-being of at least 3.2 billion people,” according to the IPBES’s latest report.

But it highlights that not all is lost, and the benefits of restoration would be 10 times higher than the costs.

One of the 23 targets of the so-called Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework is for 30 percent of degraded land, inland water, marine and coastal ecosystems to be under “effective restoration” by 2030.

A million species threatened

Over a quarter of plants and animals assessed on the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s Red List of threatened species risk extinction.

According to the IPBES, about a million species are at risk.

Pollinators, essential to the reproduction of plants and three-quarters of crops that feed humanity, are at the forefront, dying off fast.

Corals — on which the food and labor of some 850 million people depend — are another striking example.

These animals, whose reefs provide feeding and spawning grounds for a multitude of creatures, could all but disappear in a world 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than pre-industrial levels.

This is the upper limit of average planet warming the world is seeking not to exceed under the 2015 Paris Agreement on curbing Earth-warming greenhouse gases.

Five horsemen of the apocalypse

For the UN, the biodiversity crisis has five causes, all human-induced and nicknamed the “Five Horsemen of the Apocalypse.”

They are habitat destruction (for agriculture or human infrastructure), over-exploitation of resources such as water, climate change, pollution and the spread of invasive species.

Climate change is likely to become the main driver of biodiversity destruction by 2050, experts say.

Half of GDP

More than half (55%) of the world’s gross domestic product, some $58 trillion, depends “heavily or moderately” on nature and its services, according to auditing giant PwC.

Agriculture, forestry, fisheries and aquaculture, the food and beverage industry and construction are the sectors most exposed to nature loss.

Pollination services, safe water, and disease control are other, nigh-incalculable, benefits derived from nature.

Indian economist Pavan Sukhdev, who led a research project entitled The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB) had estimated that biodiversity loss comes at a cost of between 1.35 trillion and 3.1 trillion euros ($1.75 trillion and $4 trillion) per year.

$2.6 billion in subsidies

A report in September by the Earth Track monitor said environmentally harmful subsidies to industries were worth at least $2.6 trillion, equivalent to 2.5 percent of global GDP.

This dwarfs the Kunming-Montreal framework’s target of mobilizing $200 billion per year by 2030 for nature protection.

Harmful industries that benefit from subsidies include fisheries, agriculture and fossil fuel producers.

Another target of the biodiversity framework is to reduce harmful subsidies and tax benefits by “at least $500 billion per year” by 2030.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)