For decades, business and industry have profited from nature—extracting its resources, exploiting its genetic diversity and building entire industries around biological wealth.
If we are serious about making business pay a fair share of the cost of conserving the natural world it depends upon, the Cali Fund is a case study in how not to do it.
The Cali Fund is a global biodiversity fund established under the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) to receive contributions from companies that use digital sequence information (DSI) derived from genetic resources. It was officially launched on 25 February 2025.
Its purpose is straightforward: to ensure that the benefits generated from commercial use of genetic resources—particularly in industries such as pharmaceuticals, cosmetics and fragrances—are shared more fairly with the countries, Indigenous peoples and local communities from which those resources originate.
The aim of the Cali Fund was to raise US$1 billion annually but it has received just US$6,000 in corporate contributions in its first 18 months!
That is not a slow start. It is a spectacular failure.
This would be laughable if it wasn’t so wretched. And it is exactly what businesses and industries lobbied for, rejecting mandatory contributions and pretending that voluntary contributions would work just as well. Instead of $1 billion the Cali Fund still has no defines processes, no people (resources) to administer it, endless arguments over what contributions are buying and what businesses get in return. All enabling a glacial pace and ensuring the status quo – nothing to see here, move right along.
This outcome was obvious and 100% predicable. No volunteer scheme to fund nature has ever worked or will ever work because businesses have no interest in paying for something that they can get for free or at other people’s expense.
The idea that the “slow start” is because “nobody knows about the fund”, as CBD Executive Secretary Astrid Schomaker has reportedly said, is particularly difficult to swallow.
Businesses knew enough to lobby against mandatory contributions to close these deliberations down; they can’t now say they are unaware of the voluntary funding mechanism since they lobbied very hard for it and got it!
This isn’t a “novelty”, a “fascinating new mechanism”, a “new idea”. This is one of the stated three main objectives that the CBD was launched for in 1993 – The fair and equitable sharing of the benefits arising out of the utilization of genetic resources.
These ‘strategic plans’ to save biodiversity have been touted by the CBD for years. The first comprehensive strategy created the Aichi Targets adopted by the parties to the convention in October 2010, at a meeting held at Aïchi, Japan. None of the Aichi Targets were achieved.
Then came the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, in effect the world’s “Strategic Plan for Biological Diversity 2022-2030”.
After the Aichi decade failed and negotiations were disrupted by COVID-19, countries from Africa proposed something remarkably simple: a 1% biodiversity levy on the retail value of products based on genetic resources and digital sequence information, with the proceeds directed towards biodiversity conservation.
A 1% levy could hardly be called onerous or revolutionary. Yet it encountered significant resistance from wealthy countries and business interests.
Instead, the world got the Cali Fund and voluntary contributions won. And this is where the numbers become extraordinary.
A CBD-commissioned analysis estimated that annual revenues generated by commercial sectors heavily reliant on digital sequence information could be worth between US$1.5 trillion and US$2.3 trillion.
Take the conservative figure: US$1.5 trillion. A mandatory 1% levy would generate approximately US$15 billion a year.
Even under the voluntary contribution formula promoted by the Cali Fund—1% of annual profit or 0.1% of annual revenue—the potential contribution would still be measured in billions of dollars.
And what did the voluntary system actually produce? US$6,000.
The gap between the promise and the reality is so enormous it is unfathomable and at the oncoming CBD CoP17 it should force a much more uncomfortable question. Were is the evidence that businesses are willing to make voluntarily contributions?
Maybe one rule that can be put in place for all future CBD CoP meetings is that business and their lobbyists can’t spend more money attending CoP than they give to the Cali Fund! A DeSmog’s analysis business attendance at CBD CoP16, in 2024, showed 1,261 delegates representing business.
If you want to average Cali Fund donations of US$6,000, across 1,261 delegates representing business, that’s $4.76 per business delegate. Not enough to buy a cup of coffee in wealthy countries these days, but apparently enough to try to fob off developing countries and steal their genetic resources.
If companies wanted the Cali Fund to work, they could have covered the cost of CBD staff to promote and administer it – the fund was launched without funding for a dedicated staff. As Schomaker has said to companies, even if you aren’t sure, “make a gesture”. A small gesture could be to cover the cost of personnel to build and promote the voluntary process they lobbied for.
It seems all companies are doing is complaining about a “lack of information”, a lack of “clarity how these contributions [work to] in terms of implementation of the convention”, so “companies [can explain] explain to their shareholders”.
As with everything else, companies and shareholders seem to think that this is all about them. So here are my questions to companies and shareholders: