Living in harmony with nature by 2050: that is the overarching goal of the UN Biodiversity Summit currently taking place in Montreal. A frequently mentioned aim is to declare 30 percent of all land and water surface as a protected area. But another important theme this conference is DSI, digital sequence information – an umbrella term for data derived from genetic resources. The question is who has control over those sources, and who benefits from them.
Such an economic topic at first glance seems crazy like an ecological conference. But the theme goes back to 1992, when the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro laid the foundations for international treaties on climate, desertification and biodiversity. The latter treaty, the ‘Convention on Biological Diversity’ from 1993, has three pillars: conservation of biodiversity, sustainable use of ecological resources – such as sustainable logging and sustainable fishing – and a fair and equitable distribution of the proceeds from genetic resources, or from natural material from which genetic information is used for research or industrial applications, for example.
Stumbling points
And it is precisely this third pillar that has everything to do with DSI, says Bob Kreiken, who is doing his PhD on the subject at TU Delft and is now also in Montreal. At the end of 2010, a protocol was drawn up in Nagoya, Japan, in which it is legally established that countries are obliged to access and benefit sharing.” If a researcher is interested in a genetic resource, for example a plant that serves as a pharmaceutical raw material, the use must be reported. Fair access must also be negotiated with the country of origin. “It may be about financial compensation, but more essential is scientific emancipation. It is often western countries that are rich in technology and developing countries that are rich in biodiversity, and the idea is that companies or research institutes agree to share technologies, or to conduct research on a certain genetic resource together with scientists from the country of origin .”
The fact that the implementation of ABS is not going smoothly is partly due to digitization. Kreiken: “In the nineties it was about collecting plants and animals. But today, researchers can take DNA sequencers into the field to take samples in the forest or soil and transmit their data digitally without taking the original material with them. But that material is still the source of that data. So what about property rights? That is what DSI is about.”
In 2016, DSI was put on the agenda of a biodiversity summit for the first time, since then discussions have been taking place about stumbling points and possible solutions. Now it has become a staple of the top in Canada. For example, an African delegation has already advocated that 1 percent of the DSI-generated revenues should be invested in biodiversity conservation in the countries of origin.
What complicates the discussion about DSI is that it is unclear what exactly falls under it. “An agreement must be reached on the basis of legally defined concepts, but they are not there yet. Pending the agreement, companies and universities are now collecting genetic data, for which no one knows what regulations apply.”
Unjust practices
Not all genetic resources are used for economic gain, he emphasises. “There are scientists who use genetics for taxonomic research, and that can improve biodiversity. Many rich countries also say: our science contributes to making the world a better place, and that is how we already meet our obligations regarding ABS. But if companies from those countries, for example, are granted the patent on vaccines that have resulted from it, this will lead to distrust.” And sometimes there are practices going on in which companies circumvent regulations on genetic resources through biopiracy.
In Montreal, indigenous groups will also speak out about DSI. “For them, nature is something you live with, not something you profit from. But the areas where the sources come from are often managed by them, and they have a lot of knowledge about the local species. They do not want money in exchange for their information, but they do want recognition of their rights. So, for example, that their contribution is mentioned on the final product.”
The summit in Montreal will certainly not yield a ready-made document, Kreiken expects. “But a compromise is being sought between open access to genetic data and accommodating developing countries.”
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