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.)

Paris:

Deforestation continued last year at a rate far beyond pledges to end the practice by 2030, according to a major study published Tuesday.

Forests nearly the size of Ireland were lost in 2023, according to two dozen research organisations, NGOs and advocacy groups, with 6.37 million hectares (15.7 million acres) of trees felled and burned.

This “significantly exceeded” levels that would have kept the world on track to eliminate deforestation by the end of the decade, a commitment made in 2021 by more than 140 leaders.

Forests are home to 80 percent of the world’s terrestrial plant and animal species and crucial for regulating water cycles and sequestering CO2, the main greenhouse gas responsible for global warming.

“Globally, deforestation has gotten worse, not better, since the beginning of the decade,” said Ivan Palmegiani, a biodiversity and land use consultant at Climate Focus and lead author of the “Forest Declaration Assessment” report.

“We’re only six years away from a critical global deadline to end deforestation, and forests continue to be chopped down, degraded, and set ablaze at alarming rates.”

In 2023, 3.7 million hectares of tropical primary forest — particularly carbon rich and ecologically biodiverse environments — disappeared, a figure that should have fallen significantly to meet the 2030 objective.

Soya and nickel

In high-risk regions, researchers pointed to backsliding in Bolivia and in Indonesia.~CHECK~

The report said there was an “alarming rise” in deforestation in Bolivia, which jumped 351 percent between 2015 and 2023.

The “trend shows no sign of abating”, it added, with forests largely cleared for agriculture, notably for soya but also beef and sugar.

In Indonesia, deforestation slumped between 2020-2022 but started rising sharply last year.

Ironically, that is partly down to demand for materials often seen as eco-friendly, such as viscose for clothing, and a surge in nickel mining for electric vehicle batteries and renewable energy technologies.

There was better news from Brazil.

While it remains the country with the highest deforestation rates in the world, it has made key progress.

The situation has significantly improved in the Amazon, which has benefited from protective measures put in place by President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.

However, in the Cerrado, a key tropical savannah below the Amazon, deforestation has increased.

Degraded forests

The report also highlights the role of logging, road building and fires in forest degradation, when land is damaged but not razed entirely.

In 2022, the last year data was available, a forest area twice the size of Germany was degraded.

Erin Matson, senior consultant at Climate Focus, and co-author of the report, said “strong policies and strong enforcement” were needed.

“To meet global forest protection targets, we must make forest protection immune to political and economic whims,” she said.

The report comes in the wake of the European Commission’s proposal last week to postpone by a year (to the end of 2025) the entry into force of its anti-deforestation law, despite protests from NGOs.

“We have to fundamentally rethink our relationship with consumption and our models of production to shift away from a reliance on over exploiting natural resources,” said Matson.

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