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Biodiversity’s Tower of Babel: The confusion & compromise of Convention on Biological Diversity Decision 15/9 (commentary)

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Underlying parables of biblical metaphors are often only dimly remembered. The name Babel comes from the Hebrew “to confuse,” בָּלַל (bālal). The tower so ridiculed was an affront to Yahweh. Fast forward some three thousand years: Delegates will be gathering in Cali, Colombia from 21 October to 1 November 2024 to thrash out Decision 15/9 at the 16th Conference of the Parties (COP) to the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). David Cooper, the outgoing Executive Secretary of the Secretariat, heralded Decision 15/9 – a “multilateral mechanism for benefit-sharing from the use of digital sequence information on genetic resources” – as a landmark for biodiversity conservation. To make the Decision operational, 250 delegates met in Montreal, Canada from 12 to 16 August 2024 for the second Working Group on DSI (WGDSI-2). Discussion focused on how to share benefits from the use of “digital sequence information on genetic resources” (DSI). Development of the Decision is groundbreaking. A tower is under construction. But wherefore DSI? A shark in coastal mangrove forest. Image by Anita Kainrath/Ocean Image Bank. From such an innocent question, confusion ensues. The noun for bālal is bil’bul (בִּלְבּוּל), which also means disorientation. Perhaps because the term DSI cannot withstand examination, no one claims authorship. The Report from the 2018 Ad Hoc Technical Expert Group (AHTEG) reached consensus that DSI is not appropriate. When the AHTEG was re-constituted in 2020, the term nevertheless moved forward as a placeholder, apparently perpetually! The vaunted tower would be erected, and criticism would be…This article was originally published on Mongabay

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