Biodiversity summit must tackle funding, biopiracy

As proceedings got underway at Cali in Colombia, which is hosting the latest summit on the state of biodiversity conservation around the world, three main challenges before the negotiators and indeed the whole world emerged.
The first is a report released at the summit saying that despite recent glimmers of hope about biodiversity conservation, the news is worse this year, as biodiversity is declining even faster in “protected” areas, and that simply designating areas as protected is hardly enough to ensure they stay protected. The report also raises questions about the value of assigning a protected site tag to an area when the government itself allows highly destructive activities, such as drilling for oil or mining, in the same location.
Two years ago, world leaders committed to protecting a third of land and water for nature by 2030, but this target now seems to be increasingly out of reach. It is not just the encroachments into protected areas that pose a threat to biodiversity. The other two challenges are equally, if not more, important, and have to be dealt with urgently if the world is to have even a semblance of hope for biodiversity conservation.
The first is almost a repeat act of what has been plaguing the global climate change negotiations ever since they began three decades ago — promises of billions of dollars to be provided by developed countries to developing ones to help them prepare for the transition and technologies needed to curb their carbon emissions. Each year, the rich world reneges on its promises, leading to a mounting need that is estimated will add up to trillions of dollars by 2050.
In the biodiversity discussions, the situation looked better at the last summit in Montreal in 2022 when the rich countries agreed to pay $30 billion by 2030 for biodiversity conservation. Of this, $20 billion needed to be provided by 2025, which means that during the current conference the wealthy countries needed to come up with commitments regarding which country would provide how much of this and when.
It would be a mistake for global leaders to leave the Colombia summit with a mere repetition of promises since that would lead the biodiversity negotiations down the same dead-end as the climate change talks. The developing world must up the ante right now and get rich countries to sign off on a time-bound commitment, with each country providing clear dates and means for the tranches of payments needed.
This may sound like a drastic step for a global negotiation, but unfortunately there is more than enough evidence to show that any other approach leads only to repeated failures in terms of broken promises, resulting in rising mistrust during the discussions. Eventually the world ends up paying the price of inaction that stems from lack of finance and adequate access to technologies to deal with the climate crisis. 

The developing world must up the ante right now and get rich countries to sign off on a time-bound commitment.

Ranvir S. Nayar

If finance seems a difficult hill to climb at the biodiversity negotiations, the other challenge is a much bigger and more complicated affair: the issue of traditional knowledge, and the repeated attacks on these sources by companies from the developed and developing world seeking to patent this knowledge and profit from it by making their own versions of products, ranging from food ingredients and medicines to clothing and wellness products. In doing so, these companies often even sell these products to the very countries or societies from which they “stole” the know-how in the first place.
There are hundreds of such examples of what can be called “biopiracy,” where companies come as outsiders to take the raw materials from the forests and other natural resources, along with the know-how from these communities.
Local communities, mainly in the developing world, have protected these natural resources, along with the traditional knowledge on how to use these ingredients or products for thousands of years. So, it is but natural that they claim ownership of both the know-how and the resources.
For a company to step in and steal that knowledge and those resources in order to produce something marketed as “revolutionary” and innovative is not only fraudulent but also brazen theft or piracy.
It is time to regulate this as well. While there are efforts to preserve traditional know-how, mainly led by UNESCO, these are more for the sake of protecting the knowledge and the resources, but they fail to address the issue that a few businessmen are making billions of dollars off the backs of these communities on whose resources and know-how their entire business model stands.
The global summit on biodiversity must tackle this issue head on and ban any such exploitation of resources unless local communities are involved completely in the process and the profits of any such commercial ventures.
While the idea of spreading the benefits of these natural products around the world is not a bad one in itself, the use of these natural resources, which are certainly limited and fragile, needs to be strictly controlled, and who better to regulate them than the communities that have been their guardians for thousands of years?
These communities should not just be partners but also hold the power of veto in case of any conflict concerning the business venture. Only in this way can the world hope to conserve its natural resources, while also ensuring that humanity can benefit from the riches of mother nature for thousands of years to come.

• Ranvir S. Nayar is the managing editor of Media India Group and founder-director of the Europe India Foundation for Excellence.