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A standoff over biopiracy is threatening to derail a global agreement to halt the loss of nature, with developing countries demanding they are paid for drug discoveries and other commercial products based on their biodiversity.
During negotiations in Geneva for a Paris-style agreement on nature, which ended this week, the use of genetic data in a digital form – known as digital sequence information (DSI) – arose as a clear point of division, with African countries insisting any deal must include a financial mechanism to compensate them for discoveries using digital forms of their biodiversity.
With echoes of tensions in climate talks over the failure of developed countries to meet the $100bn-a-year climate finance target at Cop26 in Glasgow, a large group of developing countries, including Brazil, India and Gabon, also called on rich nations to pledge more than $100bn (£75bn) a year of biodiversity finance from public and private sources at the Cop15 summit in Kunming this year, reaching $700bn by 2030.
The disagreement came after a slow fortnight of negotiations in Switzerland, which, despite progress in some...