UN fund for sharing biodiversity benefits struggles for attention — and money

The Cali Fund, created at the 2024 UN biodiversity summit to make companies profiting from digitized genetic data share proceeds with the countries and Indigenous communities that host that biodiversity, opened for contributions in February 2025. As of the reporting, it had received a grand total of two payments — a $1,000 'ice-breaker' from UK AI startup TierraViva and $5,000 from biotech firm Prozomix — against an expected mobilization of $1 billion a year.

CBD executive secretary Astrid Schomaker attributes the shortfall to low awareness, no dedicated staff running the fund, and big companies' reluctance to be first movers, since shareholders keep asking where exactly the money goes and nobody can say. An operations manual, terms of reference, and a certification system are, nearly two years after governments agreed to create the fund, still being drafted.

Indigenous representative Aleksei Tsykarev described an institution still building its own architecture, while Malawi has pursued a separate bilateral deal with a UK biotech firm for nonfinancial benefits like training instead of waiting on the fund's cash to materialize.

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