Several UN policy processes are embracing a calcified approach to conservation and equity in science

No abstract

No abstract

The United Nations’ Convention of Biological Diversity (and the Nagoya Protocol on Access to Genetic Resources and the Fair and Equitable Sharing of Benefits Arising from their Utilization), the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations’ International Treaty for Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture, and the World Health Organisation of the United Nations’ (WHO) Pandemic Influenza Preparedness Framework all set out schemes for access and benefit sharing (ABS) some biological materials. This article addresses the apparent conflict between the general obligations in these agreements to disclose and exchange information and dealing with information as a resource derivative within the ABS transaction. This latter dealing is a closed domain for information under the ABS schemes where information is a resource derivative that is a part of the ABS transaction. Treating information as a resource derivative within the ABS transaction is likely to impose unnecessary and inefficient burdens on ABS transactions. After reviewing the recent developments, the article postulates a risk framework for valuing information as a part of the ABS transaction, or alternatively, a charge, tax, or levy to externalize the costs so that information remains available to be disclosed and exchanged promoting more and better science and research.

The global movement and use of genetic resources remain vital to sustaining humankind. An enclosure or re-appropriation of these resources requiring regulated access and benefit sharing is evolving under the United Nations' Convention on Biological Diversity and related instruments. The potential to replace the physical materials with information about those materials, including genetic sequence data, has fractured the carefully negotiated benefit sharing regulation complex. This article re-engages with this original grand bargain of access in exchange for benefit sharing, and the imperatives of transferring financial resources and technology from the technologically advanced countries of the North to the biodiversity-rich countries of the South. Public access database terms and conditions (as opposed to public domain) and collecting societies are some of the elegant legal solutions and mechanisms to address concerns about dematerialization under the current contractual approach to benefit sharing. This article concludes, however, that the tension between enclosure of information as the genetic resource and legal information sharing requirements needs more nuanced forms of benefit sharing such as taxes or levies. This is necessary to facilitate movement of not only the physical materials but also information in the access and benefit sharing bargain.