The critical role of governments in benefit sharing

The critical role of governments in benefit sharing Dominic Muyldermans and Frank Michiels outline the key role governments can play in making a new multilateral mechanism for benefit sharing a success. The fair and equitable sharing of benefits from using biodiversity is one of the key objectives of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD, 1992). (1) In 2010, a supplementary agreement to the CBD was adopted, the ‘Nagoya Protocol on Access and Benefit-sharing’, (2) which aimed to establish more concrete guidelines for access to genetic resources and the sharing of benefits. Due to a continued lack of meaningful benefit sharing and the shifting nature of biological research and innovation, moving away from access to physical genetic resources towards DNA sequences accessed in public, open-access databases or generated on the computer, there have been increasing calls for benefit sharing from the use of ‘Digital Sequence Information’ (DSI). As a result, at COP15 at the end of 2022, the Parties decided to establish, as part of the Kunming- Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, (3) a multilateral mechanism for benefit-sharing from the use of DSI, including a global fund. (4) How this mechanism will function and be implemented has yet to be determined. This article aims to emphasise the key role governments can play in making this new mechanism a success.