A simple plan could raise the billions needed to stem biodiversity loss

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The Lehmann’s poison frog, a critically endangered species, is endemic to southwest Colombia, where negotiators are meeting for the COP16 biodiversity summit.

Minden photos/Alamy

The 16thth The Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity, or CBD COP16 for short, begins this week in Cali, Colombia. The summit will discuss a series of key actions needed to stem biodiversity loss, such as protecting 30 percent of the planet’s land and water by 2030.

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

One possible solution on the table in Cali is a proposal to levy a 1 percent profit-sharing levy on global retail sales and channel the money to support conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity. With global retail sales expected to soon reach $25 trillion, “a penny for life on Earth” could raise $250 billion annually. This would be a simple solution to the complex question of how to ensure that everyone, including nature, benefits from the richness of biodiversity.

This proposal first came back in June 2021 from the African Group, for which I served as lead negotiator on biodiversity-related issues for over a decade. The idea was born from debates on how to share benefits equitably of the exploitation of the planet’s biodiversity, which is the little-known third objective of the biodiversity convention, after conservation and sustainable use. This long-standing question has been revived by debates over how to manage the flood of electronic biological data made possible by DNA sequencing and other technologies.

The conversion of biological information such as 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 stimulated a multitude of industries. But the benefits are not shared fairly and digital data creates new profit opportunities without giving anything back to nature. Profitable biotechnology companies are concentrated in high-income countries, while the biodiversity that forms the basis of much of their research and development is concentrated in low-income countries. The existing benefit-sharing framework, known as the Nagoya Protocol, only concerns physical specimens and is woefully inadequate for the digital age.

Solving this problem presents an opportunity. After six years of deliberations, we made a breakthrough on this issue in Montreal, with all countries agreeing to create a multilateral mechanism to share the benefits of biological digital sequence information. The job in Cali is to put this into practice. Yet exactly how this is achieved is very important, especially to the scientists and other innovators who use this data. If countries are serious about solving the problem biodiversity crisisthey should design a mechanism of appropriate scale.

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

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

This approach is also by far the simplest of the options currently offered. The alternatives would all require scientists and companies that use genetic data to account for their research and commercial activities and pay a share of their total revenue or profits from those products. This would create unnecessary complexities such as reporting, monitoring, avoidance, splitting hairs and other tasks for lawyers. Total revenue from biodiversity would be an order of magnitude less than 1 percent of all retail sales.

This simplicity is why most scientists, businesses, and governments I have spoken with privately support this proposal in principle. But they don’t say it in public, because they think it’s too idealistic to work in practice. I would remind them of the wise words of Nelson Mandela: “It always seems impossible until it’s done.” Governments have never met any global biodiversity targets, while corporations have grudgingly contributed as little as they can, so why not let consumers around the world have a go?

Any agreement in Cali on DSI benefit sharing will not be legally binding. But the 1 Percent Retail Plan does not need to be legally binding to succeed: if all the world’s governments unanimously asked all retailers to collect the profit-sharing levy and required them to transparently declare whether they have done so or not, the court of public opinion will be the final judge of who are good corporate citizens. As already agreed in Montreal, the money would be disbursed through a global biodiversity fund to support the conservation and restoration of biodiversity, particularly by indigenous peoples and local communities who are the best guardians of nature.

If Colombia’s COP16 presidency succeeds in getting the world to agree to this simple but ambitious plan, Cali could still be remembered for mobilizing the massive resources needed to stem biodiversity loss and accomplishing its mission to “make peace with nature.”

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