A groundbreaking new plan to get Big Pharma to pay for wildlife conservation

CALI, Colombia — In the face of extreme and accelerating wildlife declines, government officials from nearly every country have agreed to a groundbreaking new deal meant to funnel more money and other resources into conservation, especially in poor regions of the world.

If it works, the deal — finalized Saturday morning at a United Nations biodiversity meeting known as COP16 — could raise hundreds of millions of dollars, or perhaps more than $1 billion, per year, to protect the environment.

The deal is designed to draw money from a new and somewhat unusual source: companies that create and sell products, such as drugs and cosmetics, using the DNA of wild organisms. Today a large number of databases store this sort of genetic data — extracted from plants, animals, and microbes all over the world — and make it available for anyone to use, including companies. Corporations in a range of industries use this genetic data, known as digital sequence information (DSI), to find and create commercial products. Moderna, for example, used hundreds of genetic sequences from different respiratory viruses to swiftly produce its Covid-19 vaccine. Moderna has generated more than $30 billion in sales from the vaccine.

“It is absolutely, 100 percent clear that companies benefit from biodiversity,” Amber Scholz, a scientist at Leibniz Institute DSMZ, a German research organization, told Vox. 

This new plan is meant to share some of those benefits, including profits, with nature. It states that large companies and other organizations in sectors that rely on DNA sequences — such as pharmaceuticals, biotechnology, and food supplements — should put a portion of their profits or revenue into a fund called the Cali fund. According to the plan, that portion is either 1 percent of profit or 0.1 percent of revenue, though it leaves some wiggle room and remains open to review. This approach draws heavily from research by the London School of Economics.

The new Cali fund, operated by the UN, will go toward conserving biodiversity — the plants and animals from which all that genetic information stems. It will dish out the money to countries based on things like how much wildlife they have and how much genetic data they are producing. At least half of the money is meant to support Indigenous people and local communities, especially in low-income parts of the world, according to the plan. The exact formula for how money will be divvied up will be decided later.

“It is a global opportunity for businesses who are benefiting from nature to be able to quickly and easily put some money where it’s genuinely going to make a difference in nature conservation,” William Lockhart, a UK government official who co-led negotiations for the new plan, told Vox on Friday.

Remarkably, the new plan is the only international tool to fund conservation nearly entirely with money from the private sector, Lockhart said.

“It will change the lives of people,” Flora Mokgohloa, a negotiator with the government of South Africa, told Vox Friday, referring to how the plan could fund local communities who harbor biodiversity.

In some ways this new plan is meant to correct longstanding power imbalances, said Siva Thambisetty, an associate professor of intellectual property law at the London School of Economics. Many of the world’s hotspots of biodiversity are in developing nations, like the Democratic Republic of Congo, yet many of the companies that profit from that biodiversity are based in wealthy countries.

“This is about correcting an injustice,” Thambisetty said. “A number of biodiverse countries have been alienated from the value of their resources.” 

“It’s a big deal,” she said of the plan, when it was in draft form.

There are still many unknowns, including how much money this mechanism might ultimately generate and how enforceable it will be. The deal was reached in the final hours of COP16, a meeting of roughly 180 world governments that are members of a global environmental treaty called the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). While that treaty is legally binding, this new plan — which is a “decision” in treaty parlance — is not. So unless countries enshrine the decision in their own legislation, it will be difficult to enforce. (Some countries already have legislation to regulate access to their genetic data. It’s still not clear how these national laws will work alongside the new global approach.)

What’s more is that the US, the world’s largest economy, is one of two nations that’s not a member of the CBD treaty. The other is the Vatican. That means American companies may have even less of an incentive to follow this new plan and pay the fee for using DNA extracted from wild organisms. 

Some advocates for lower-income countries are unhappy with the plan, saying it doesn’t do enough to remedy the problem of what they call biopiracy. That’s when companies commercialize biodiversity, including DNA, and fail to share the benefits that stem from those resources — including profits — with the communities who safeguard them. The plan undermines a country’s ability to control who gets to use its genetic resources, said Nithin Ramakrishnan, a senior researcher at Third World Network, a group that advocates for human rights and benefit sharing. “You’re just creating a voluntary fund that promotes biopiracy,” he said.

Nonetheless, this decision — which resulted from hours of negotiations, often over single words — still has a lot of power, experts told Vox. Many companies, and especially those with international operations, will likely pay the fee, or a portion of it, they said, even if they’re based in the US. That’s because they operate in regions, such as the European Union, where this new plan will likely be honored. “The big companies are pretty engaged here,” Scholz, who is based in Germany, said. “They have a significant reputational risk.”

Basecamp Research, a London-based startup that claims to manage the world’s largest database of non-human genetic sequences, wasn’t worried about a potential fee. “We are quite comfortable and willing to contribute,” Bupe Mwambingu, the company’s biodiversity partnerships manager, said. “It is going to go toward conserving biodiversity, which is the resource that we are tapping into for our business.” (It’s not clear whether Basecamp Research would be obligated to pay the fee under this new plan.)

Early reactions from the pharmaceutical industry suggest it’s not thrilled. On Saturday morning, David Reddy, director general of the International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers and Associations, said in a statement that the new plan does “not get the balance right” between the benefits it could generate and the potential “costs to society and science.”

“Any new system should not introduce further conditions on how scientists access such data and add to a complex web of regulation, taxation and other obligations for the whole R&D ecosystem — including on academia and biotech companies,” he said.

Even under a best-case scenario, money is unlikely to flow into the Cali fund for several years, Scholz said. And there won’t be a lot of it — certainly nothing close to the $700 billion a year needed to thwart biodiversity loss.

But aside from the money it could generate, this new plan signals something important: Companies and scientists in wealthy regions should share the benefits they derive from nature. Even if it was harvested from digital DNA.

Want to go deeper? Check out our explainer about digital sequence information and how it’s used.