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Biotech firms are meant to pay to use Earth’s genetic data. They’re not.
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Officials wave to participants as this year’s COP17 global biodiversity summit in Yerevan, Armenia, ends.Credit: Karen Minasyan/AFP via Getty
Two years ago, countries attending a United Nations biodiversity summit agreed that companies profiting from genetic data from Earth’s plants, animals and microbial life should pay a small percentage of their revenue to help preserve nature for future generations. But so far, only a handful of small biotechnology firms have contributed a total of just US$10,588.
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Initial estimates indicated that it might be possible to collect a total of $1 billion per year from companies that use publicly available genetic data to create their products. Nobody knew that the actual amount gathered would be so much lower, says Amber Scholz, a microbiologist at the Leibniz Institute DSMZ in Braunschweig, Germany, who was involved in negotiating the Cali Fund, which takes in the money. “It is disappointing. There’s no way to sugar-coat that.”
When the Cali Fund was created in 2024, it was hailed as a conservation breakthrough, following years of negotiations among countries about how to fairly share the ‘digital sequence information’ that plays a part in creating medicines, cosmetics, engineered crops and more. (For instance, a gene from one plant can be stitched into another to make it more drought resistant.) Low-resource countries with lots of biodiversity but few biotech firms argued that wealthy nations with a strong industrial sector were engaging in ‘biopiracy’ by using public genetic data gleaned from their wildlife without giving anything in return.
“In any other sector, if you’re using a resource, you’d be expected to pay for it,” says James Finnigan, the technical director at Prozomix, a small biotech firm in Haltwhistle, UK, that has pledged to contribute 0.1% of its future revenue to the Cali Fund and has deposited $5,000 — the most from any company so far. It’s part of “putting something back into the biodiversity that we all exploit”, he says.
Prozomix is one of just five firms that have so far given to the fund, which the UN runs and decides how to distribute to support global conservation projects. This lack of participation was a topic of discussion at the latest UN biodiversity summit, COP17, which concluded last week in Yerevan, Armenia. Over two weeks, countries took stock of the world’s progress towards halting biodiversity loss driven by climate change and humans’ expanding environmental footprint. Countries remain far off their goal of mobilizing $200 billion a year for biodiversity conservation by 2030.
In theory, the Cali Fund could be a substantial source of new funding. Globally, more than 20,000 companies that are using publicly available genetic information from Earth’s species are considered large enough to contribute to the Cali Fund, according to a June report by Agata Makowska-Curran1, an economist at the London School of Economics and Political Science. (Firms are considered large enough, for instance, if they have at least $50 million in revenue per year.) If all of those eligible contributed 0.1% of their revenue or 1% of their profits, as the UN encourages, Makowska-Curran’s analysis found that the fund could raise up to $3.6 billion each year. Given that the fund is voluntary, however, she suggests that a more realistic estimate is nearly $1 billion annually.
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