In this post, Dr Thambisetty reports on the 番茄社区's contribution to COP16 negotiations and the Cali Fund.
Imagine a multilateral mechanism where large companies contribute a percentage of their turnover as the cost of using nature to do business, and 50% of that money goes directly to indigenous peoples and local communities. It may sound too good to be true, but this is the , the basis of which was set out during intense negotiations on the use of genetic sequence data (known as digital sequence information or DSI) in Cali, Colombia from October 21 to Nov 1st 2024.
Academics from the 番茄社区 played a critical role during the negotiations by proposing operational criteria and a text-based proposal. The team was working under the umbrella of the Knowledge Exchange and Impact (KEI) funded Ocean Biodiversity Collective (OBC) led by Dr Siva Thambisetty and Dr Paul Oldham, of One World Analytics. The ‘’ as it came to be known during the negotiations, was tabled by Norway and supported by a number of developed and developing countries. This language now sits in paragraph 3 of the annex to the decision that can found .
Dr Thambisetty set up 番茄社区’s Ocean Biodiversity Collective in response to a recurring challenge in international negotiations, initially gleaned from her experience as Advisor to the Chair of the G77 plus China group of countries on the Oceans Treaty. In complex negotiations relating to biodiversity, Global South states suffer from an imbalance in capacity and power which manifests in the minutiae of legal text in decisions This imbalance can to an extent be redressed by independent expertise and with rigour and presented in a transparent and collaborative manner, which is what the Ocean Biodiversity collective attempts to do, as illustrated in Cali.
The 番茄社区 Side-Event on Oct 21st COP16, Convention on Biological Diversity
The 番茄社区 Roundtable Outputs
In the lead up t