Simple plan could raise the billions needed to stem biodiversity loss

The 16^th Conference of the Parties to the UN Convention on Biological Diversity, CBD COP16 for short, starts in Cali, Colombia, this week. The summit will discuss a slate of essential actions needed to stem biodiversity loss, such as protecting 30 per cent of the planet’s land and water by 2030.

In 2022, the world agreed in Montreal on an ambitious plan to protect nature. This “Global Biodiversity Framework” has 23 targets, but the reality is that achieving any of them depends on one thing: money. The United Nations estimates around $700 billion a year is needed. Of that, $500 billion is expected to come from reforming subsidies that harm biodiversity, leaving a funding gap of $200 billion. But rich countries have so far pledged just $30 billion a year by 2030, far short of what’s required. Where will the rest of the cash come from?

One possible solution on the table in Cali is a proposal to collect a 1 per cent benefit sharing levy on global retail sales and channel the money to support conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity. With global retail sales predicted to reach $25 trillion soon, a “penny on the pound for life on Earth” could mobilise $250 billion a year. That would be a simple solution to the complex issue of how to make sure everyone, nature included, benefits from the wealth of biodiversity.

This proposal first came back in June 2021 from the African Group of countries, for which I served as a lead negotiator on issues related to biodiversity for more than a decade. The idea stemmed from debates about how to fairly share benefits from using the planet’s biodiversity, which is the little-known third objective of the biodiversity convention, after conservation and sustainable use. This longstanding question was rekindled by debates about how to manage the flood of electronic biological data enabled by DNA sequencing and other technologies.

Converting biological information like DNA into electronic data (known in the arcane language of UN negotiations as digital sequence information or DSI) that can be shared online and manipulated by computers has radically transformed virtually all life sciences and boosted a host of industries. But the benefits aren’t being shared fairly, and digital data creates new opportunities for making profits without giving anything back to nature. Profitable biotech firms are concentrated in higher-income countries, while the biodiversity that forms the basis for much of their research and development is concentrated in lower-income countries. The existing framework to share benefits, known as the Nagoya Protocol, deals only with physical specimens and is woefully inadequate for the digital age.

Resolving this problem presents an opportunity. After six years of deliberations, we achieved a breakthrough on this issue in Montreal, with all countries agreeing to create a multilateral mechanism to share benefits from biological digital sequence information. The job in Cali is to put this into action. Yet exactly how this is done matters a great deal, especially to scientists and other innovators who are the users of such data. If countries are serious about solving the biodiversity crisis, they should design a mechanism that is of appropriate scale.

A 1 per cent levy on global retail would achieve that. Such a predictable financial flow to environmental prerogatives would completely change the “mood music” of global environmental governance. And it would come while there is still time to save the most precious remainders of life’s vast profusion before we humans push it into oblivion.

The retail sector has a unique position in latter-day capitalism: it collects consumer spending on behalf of all actors in the value chain. Charging “nature’s share” at the retail level means everyone involved contributes a little bit, and no one has to carry a huge burden. The system doesn’t have to be perfect either: if the richest half of humanity paid one dollar a week, $200 billion a year is within reach.

This approach is also by far the simplest of the options now on the table. The alternatives would all require scientists and companies that use genetic data to report on their research and business activities and pay a share of their total turnover, or their profits from those products. That would create unnecessary complexities such as reporting, monitoring, opportunities for avoidance, hair-splitting and other work for lawyers. The total income to biodiversity would be orders of magnitude lower than 1 per cent of all retail sales.

That simplicity is why most scientists, businesses and governments I’ve spoken with privately support this proposal in principle. They don’t say so in public, though, because they think it’s too idealistic to work in practice. I would remind them of Nelson Mandela’s wise words: “It always seems impossible until it’s done”. Governments have never achieved any global biodiversity goals, while companies have reluctantly contributed as little as they could get away with, so why not let the world’s consumers give it a try?

Any agreement in Cali on sharing DSI benefits won’t be legally binding. But the 1 per cent of retail plan needn’t be legally binding to be successful: if all the governments of the world unanimously asked all retailers to collect the benefit sharing levy and obliged them to report transparently whether or not they have done so, the court of public opinion will be the final judge of who the good corporate citizens are. As already agreed in Montreal the money would be disbursed through a global biodiversity fund to support biodiversity conservation and restoration, in particular by indigenous peoples and local communities who are the best stewards of nature.

If Colombia’s COP16 presidency can lead the world to agree to this simple but ambitious plan, Cali might yet be remembered for mobilising the massive resources needed to stem biodiversity loss and achieving its mission to “make peace with nature”.