Tech, not policy, will save Nature

At COP16, everyday a new version of the DSI (Digital Sequence Information) is released.

This topic exemplifies how a technical issue has become entangled in historical and political debate and how, despite over a decade of discussions, DSI remains contentious and, arguably, increasingly irrelevant.

The sequences now labeled as DSI are seen by some as a potential loophole in the Nagoya Protocol, allowing industrialized countries to sidestep benefit-sharing obligations. But in reality, there is no loophole. DSI is not an independent genetic resource; each digital sequence represents DNA from an organism already covered by the Nagoya Protocol or national laws like Brazil’s Law 13123.

The real issue lies with publicly accessible biodiversity sequences, mostly generated before Nagoya, by academic research funded with public money. These projects required sequences to be made openly available in international databases, mostly in the US, Europe, and Japan, to advance science. It is practically impossible to trace the original source of this publicly accessible biological information or apply ABS measures to it.

This document appears less about practical solutions and more as a response from biodiversity-rich but technology-poor countries to the perceived sidestepping of benefit-sharing obligations. Yet, I have not seen any technical or economic analysis of the actual potential of these public sequences to drive the bioeconomy or of the feasibility and cost of enforcing new DSI regulations.

In the above image, presented by biotech company Basecamp Research, in orange you can see sequences subject to the DSI debate: they were largely generated over the past 30-40 years, are often low-quality, poorly annotated, and hard to trace. New sequences, obtained under ABS agreements and produced by new sequencing technologies, are high-quality, carefully annotated and fully traceable. The volume of these new sequences is about 10 times that of the old ones. Training an AI model on the data in question under DSI would yield a poorly trained model, leaving it uncompetitive.

The Nagoya Protocol and Brazilian legislation are sound legal instruments that give us all we need to move forward. While we are stalled in discussions about reparations—caught in what Nelson Rodrigues would call our “underdog complex”, high tech countries are using their technology advantage to move even further away.

With technological advances, sequencing a human genome now costs under $1,000, down from $100 million in 2001. Tools like CRISPR are democratizing access to the bioeconomy. Instead of creating new policies for public DSI data, we need to move beyond this mindset and focus on training a new generation of scientists capable of transforming our genetic resources into wealth.

Is in technology that we need to advance, not policy! Without technology, the forest remains just another commodity.