Presentations
- Amber Scholz – Leibniz Institute DSMZ | Why does harmonization matter?
- Martha Cepeda – Universidad Central, Bogotá | DSI for Biodiversity Conservation and Food Security: A Wild Cacao Story
- Christian Tiambo – Center for Tropical Livestock Genetics and Health, ILRI | Better Lives through livestock: DSI as the impact accelerator in the global south
- David Nicholson – Wellcome Sanger Institute | Harmonised benefit-sharing to support equitable pathogen genomics
Digital Sequence Information (DSI) underpins vast swathes of current research in the life sciences, and has contributed to significant advances in medicine, conservation, agriculture, and other fields. Ensuring fair and equitable sharing of the benefits that accrue from the use of DSI is important and is the subject of ongoing discussions in four UN fora – under the Convention on Biological Diversity, the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture (ITPGRFA), the World Health Organisation (WHO) and the High Seas Treaty (BBNJ).
The resulting systems that could be put in place under each of these international conventions will shape national policies and laws, and in turn affect how researchers access and share information, collaborate, and ultimately impact innovation in fields of crucial importance to sustainable development, from public health to marine conservation.
For these systems to maximise the benefit sharing potential without creating unnecessary or counterproductive barriers to research, coherence between different benefit sharing systems is necessary.
This side event will look at the different proposals currently being considered and discuss possible benefits and risks of different approaches from the perspective of researchers who use DSI relevant to multiple fora.
Date: 15 November 2023 at 1:15pm Central European Time, In-person only
Location: Room 3- Asia & Pacific, CBD DSIWG1 meeting, Geneva