COP17 Sets a $150m Trigger for a Fund Holding Under $9,000

The decision on genetic data adopted at the UN biodiversity conference in Yerevan authorises the Cali Fund to start paying money out before governments have agreed how to divide it, provided the fund first reaches $150 million. The president's text on agenda item 11, adopted without objection at 5.25am on 31 October 2026 in the seventh hour of the final plenary, grants the fund's steering committee that power "on an exceptional basis" and withdraws it again at the close of COP18. Carbon Brief, which reported from the venue, put the fund's actual deposits at under $9,000.

The Cali Fund exists to move money from companies that use digital sequence information, the genetic data derived from nature that pharmaceutical, agribusiness and cosmetics firms build products on, back to the countries and communities the biological material came from. Countries created it at COP16 in Cali in 2024 under decision 16/2, and the UN administers it through the Multi-Partner Trust Fund Office.

What the president's text actually decides

Paragraph 6 reaffirms the indicative rates agreed in Cali: 1 per cent of the profit or 0.1 per cent of the revenue of entities using digital sequence information. Those rates remain indicative and the contributions remain voluntary. Paragraph 11 clarifies that only contributions made at that level earn a Cali Fund certificate for the year concerned.

Paragraph 18 is the operative one. It lets the steering committee allocate funding before the full methodology is adopted at COP18, conditional on capitalisation reaching 150 million United States dollars, and sets out the split. Of the half directed to developing countries, 20 per cent would be shared equally among them, 10 per cent weighted by gross national income per capita on the UN scale of assessments, and 70 per cent by the Global Environment Facility's Benefits Index for Biodiversity. The other half goes to the self-identified needs of indigenous peoples and local communities, 90 per cent of it reserved for communities in developing countries, least developed countries, small island states and economies in transition.

Paragraph 3 establishes an ad hoc open-ended working group to carry the unfinished business to COP18. Countries voted during the same plenary for Quito, Ecuador, to host that meeting in 2028.

The gap between the trigger and the balance

Carbon Brief reported on 31 October 2026 that the fund held about $6,000 when the Yerevan talks opened, and that by the end pledges totalled $10,565 with under $9,000 in actual deposits. No large company in the sectors identified as reliant on digital sequence information has contributed, it said. Brazil, backed by other developing countries, argued during the talks that contributions should reach at least $200 million in the pilot phase before anyone discussed allocation.

Siva Thambisetty, associate professor of law at the London School of Economics, told Carbon Brief after the talks closed:

Not everyone read it that way. Fiji's Sivendra Michael, who chaired the consultations that produced the final text, told Carbon Brief minutes after adoption that the methodology for distributing benefits "should respect the rights of Indigenous peoples".

The honest reading is that Yerevan solved the easier half of the problem. The allocation formula in paragraph 18 is specific, numerate and genuinely negotiated, down to which index weights which share. The question of who pays, and whether anything compels them to, went to a working group that reports in two years.

What is not known is whether certificates change corporate behaviour. Industry representatives at an informal dialogue on 23 October told Carbon Brief they wanted more legal certainty before pledging further. Whether certainty was ever the binding constraint, rather than the absence of any obligation to pay, is not testable until the next contributions arrive.

The review of the mechanism's effectiveness falls due at COP18, using a methodology this same decision adopts for that single use. On the evidence of the first two years, it will be assessing a distribution system that has had almost nothing to distribute.