UN summit approves fund to share benefits of nature's sequenced genetic data

UN summit in Colombia creates fund to share profits from genetic data, benefiting communities in developing countries.

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.