It took more than three decades of international negotiation to get here. The Cali Fund, launched in Rome on February 25, 2025, is the concrete result of a long-running argument over who gets paid when a company uses a genetic sequence from a rainforest plant to develop a blockbuster drug.
The fund’s full name tells the story: the Cali Fund for the Fair and Equitable Sharing of Benefits from the Use of Digital Sequence Information on Genetic Resources. It was established during the resumed session of the 16th Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity, the global treaty that has governed biodiversity since 1993.
For years, the Convention on Biological Diversity had a hole in it. Countries rich in biodiversity—mostly in the global south—demanded that when a pharmaceutical or agricultural firm used their genetic resources, some money had to flow back. But digital sequence information, or DSI, changed the game. A researcher in Geneva no longer needs a physical leaf from the Amazon. They just need the sequence data, which can be stored, copied, and shared online in seconds. The old benefit-sharing rules did not cover that.
That is what the Cali Fund is designed to fix. It targets private sector entities that use digital sequence information. The fund will collect money from them and channel it to biodiversity-rich countries, indigenous peoples, and local communities. The logic is straightforward: if a company profits from a genetic code that originated in a particular ecosystem, the people who stewarded that ecosystem should see some of the profit.
The sums are not trivial. The fund is meant to mobilize significant resources, though the exact targets and payment structures will be worked out as the mechanism becomes operational. What is clear is that the fund’s creators see it as a way to close the gap between the users of genetic data and the providers of the raw biological material.
This is not a charity. It is a market correction. Biotechnology, pharmaceuticals, and agriculture all rely on genetic resources and the digital sequences derived from them. Those industries have grown enormously while the countries holding the original genetic material have often seen nothing. The Cali Fund is meant to change that balance.
The timing matters. The COP 16 meeting in Rome was a resumed session, meaning the original conference in Cali, Colombia, had left unfinished business. The fund was named after that host city. The fact that negotiators came back to Rome to finish the job shows how hard this was to agree on. Developing countries pushed hard. Some industry groups resisted. The final deal represents a compromise, but a compromise that shifts the direction of travel.
The fund also sends a signal about conservation. When genetic resources have no market value, there is little economic reason to preserve the ecosystems that hold them. The Cali Fund creates a financial incentive. If a forest in Indonesia or a reef in the Philippines contains genetic sequences that might one day be valuable, there is now a mechanism to ensure that value flows back to the people who protect those places.
Indigenous peoples and local communities are named explicitly in the fund’s purpose. That is a deliberate choice. Many of the world’s most biodiverse areas are on lands managed by indigenous groups. Under the old system, those groups had no claim on the benefits from genetic data taken from their territories. The Cali Fund changes that.
The mechanism is new. It will take time to see whether it works in practice. But the launch in Rome was not a symbolic gesture. It was the end of a negotiation that stretched back to the original Convention on Biological Diversity, and it was the beginning of a system that could reshape how the world values genetic information.
