COP16 Talks in Colombia Adopt a Novel Way to Pay for Conservation

Diplomats from roughly 180 countries ended two weeks of environmental talks on Saturday after agreeing on a new fund that would shift some of the profits from nature’s DNA to global conservation efforts.

The agreement calls for companies that make money from genetic information stored in databases, known as digital sequence information, to pay into a fund as a sort of fee for the use of biodiversity.

Scientific advances have made it easier and cheaper for researchers to sequence genetic material. That means there are now vast amounts available in databases for pharmaceutical, cosmetic, biotechnology and other companies to analyze as they seek to develop new products.

Delegates at the talks, known as COP16, shorthand for the 16th Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity, called the agreement an important breakthrough.

“Conservation is mostly funded by governments and philanthropy,” said Amber Scholz, who leads the science policy department at Leibniz Institute DSMZ, a German research institute that focuses on microbial and cellular biodiversity. “Now, businesses that profit from biodiversity will pay into a new fund.”

The final declaration made the fund voluntary, saying that companies “should” contribute.

The agreement lays out specifics on how much they should pay: 1 percent of their profits or 0.1 percent of their revenue, as a guideline. Governments are “invited” to take legislative or other measures to require companies to contribute.

Such a fund could raise perhaps $1 billion per year for biodiversity conservation, according to research commissioned by the secretariat that governs the treaty.

In a move that signals the growing recognition of Indigenous people as custodians of biodiversity, half of the funds are directed toward them, though countries reserved some wiggle room.

The talks ran past their Friday evening deadline and ended abruptly on Saturday, when delegates began leaving for the airport and quorum was lost. Certain agenda items, including a contentious one on how to mobilize and distribute $200 billion a year by 2030, remained unresolved.

The negotiations will resume at a future date, officials said.

COP16 was a follow-up to the 15th round of global biodiversity talks, held in Montreal in 2022, which set ambitious targets to conserve and restore nature.

“The survival of our planet’s biodiversity and our own survival are on the line,” the United Nations secretary general, António Guterres, said on Wednesday during his visit to Cali. “We don’t have a moment to lose.”

Throughout the two weeks, distrust ran high between donor countries and those that are poorer economically but rich in biodiversity. Tensions crystallized in a standoff over whether to create a new biodiversity fund that would give recipient countries more control over spending. Donor countries said the new administrative costs would be a waste of money and expressed concerns about potential misuse of funds.

Ultimately, the talks lost quorum before they resolved the issue.

“There’s a lot of geopolitical tensions,” said Susana Muhamad, Colombia’s environment minister and the president of the talks. “But on the other hand, there were decisions that were very difficult and the parties were able to take them.”

An increasing amount of biodiversity funding from wealthy countries and development banks comes in the form of loans, said Mark Opel, the finance lead at Campaign for Nature, an advocacy group. And if delegates can’t generate sources of funding, developing countries will have to rely on more loans even as they suffer the consequences of a climate crisis created by wealthy countries.

“If we’re now expecting countries whose economies have been wrecked by climate change to take loans for their biodiversity finance, it’s almost like running into someone’s car, wrecking their car and offering them a loan to go fix their car,” said Jiwoh Abdulai, Sierra Leone’s environment minister.

Also left unresolved was a plan for measuring how well countries are achieving their biodiversity commitments. The plan had faced delays from agricultural interests that expressed concerns about one aspect, gauging the success of efforts to reduce the risks from pesticides.

As negotiations wore on, the arcane world of digital genetic information grabbed more and more attention.

Around the world, researchers working on all kinds of scientific projects upload genetic information to three main databases that sync with one other. Together, they form a freely accessible global genetic library.

So far, businesses that use those databases to develop products have been able to do so for free. That approach amounts to biopiracy, according to some countries and advocates. At the Montreal biodiversity talks in 2022, nations agreed to create a means by which payments for the use of this digital information could be collected to fund biodiversity work.

The task in Cali was to agree on the details.

While the United States is not party to the underlying treaty, it supported an agreement that involved voluntary contributions, according to senior State Department officials.

As the talks opened, the International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers & Associations issued a warning that tax-based proposals could stifle innovation and delay research and development.

On Saturday, David Reddy, the director general of the federation, said the final decision “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.”

Environmental advocates in Cali pointed to the industry’s profits.

Public databases and academic and public research institutions were not expected to contribute to the fund, the agreement noted.

The talks were the largest in the three-decade history of the Convention on Biological Diversity, with about 14,000 delegates in attendance, officials said. Along with diplomats from around the world, there were representatives from advocacy groups, businesses, Indigenous organizations and academic institutions.

Conservation groups big and small have long been a mainstay of the biodiversity talks, but the presence of business was felt more than ever. Some attendees were from business-oriented groups focused on trying to make the private sector account for and minimize its damage to nature. Others were lobbying to soften elements of the agreements that could hurt their companies or representatives.

“Companies are seeing they need to engage with this,” said Oscar Soria, a longtime environmental campaigner who has been active in international negotiations.

The talks also ended with victories for Indigenous people, who got a permanent body that would give them more influence over negotiations, and for certain communities of African descent in Latin America, whose contributions to nature were recognized for the first time.

Viviana Figueroa, a global technical coordinator at the International Indigenous Forum on Biodiversity, an umbrella group, said the additional influence over negotiations was especially important because it would create a space for traditional knowledge to contribute to the conservation of biodiversity.

“For Indigenous people, it’s a historic day,” she said.

The Colombian organizers declared the event “the People’s COP,” and in central Cali, several miles from the negotiations, it seemed that the whole city was participating in a celebration of biodiversity.

Families posed for photos in front of a large sculpture of the event’s flower symbol. They lined up to listen to an installation playing the natural sounds of the region, read about various species and watched speeches. One exhibit consisted of a simple wooden box with a sign above inviting people to write down and deposit their own commitment to nature.

“This was the People’s COP,” Ms. Muhamad said. “And nobody can take that from us.”