NBSAPs Target 13 – Increase sharing of benefits from genetic resources and traditional knowledge
GBF-aligned NBSAPS to ensure just, sustainable futures for all life to thrive: the role of African civil society
FACTSHEET 8
Target 13: Increase the sharing of benefits from genetic resources, digital sequence information, and traditional knowledge
The African Centre for Biodiversity (ACB) is committed to dismantling inequalities and resisting corporate industrial expansion in Africa’s food and agriculture systems.
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Researched and written by research associate Linzi Lewis
Editorial oversight and input by ACB executive director Mariam Mayet
Design and layout: Katerina Sonntagova, Moss and Sea Studio
Cover art: Clouds Building by Jess Hooft, https://www.jesshooft-art.com/
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The ACB gratefully acknowledges the financial support of several donors, though the views expressed may not necessarily reflect the views of our donors.
May 2026
ABS Access and benefit-sharing
BBNJ Agreement on Marine Biological Diversity of Areas beyond National Jurisdiction
CBD Convention on Biological Diversity
COP Conference of the Parties
DSI Digital sequence information
GB-11 Eleventh Governing Body Session of the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture
IPLCs Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities
ITPGRFA International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture
KM–GBF Kunming–Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework
MLS Multilateral system
NBSAPs National Biodiversity Strategies and Action Plans
PGRFA Plant genetic resources for food and agriculture
SMTA Standard Material Transfer Agreement
Executive summary
Digital sequence information (DSI) created a long-running gap in access and benefit-sharing (ABS) frameworks by enabling commercial use without physical access to genetic resources.
The 16th Conference of the Parties (COP) to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) (Decision 16/2) established an initial multilateral mechanism and the Cali Fund, shifting the debate from legal classification to governance and implementation.
Target 13 will only succeed if DSI benefit-sharing is mandatory, predictable, and front-loaded; voluntary contributions and narrow triggers risk repeating failures seen under the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture (ITPGRFA) multilateral system.
This paper sets out African civil society priorities for COP17 and for integrating Target 13 into National Biodiversity Strategies and Action Plans (NBSAPs), including fair contribution thresholds, transparent allocation rules, and rights-based safeguards for Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities (IPLCs).
About this paper
DSI emerged as a highly contentious issue at COP13 of the CBD in 2016, when developing countries argued that advances in biotechnology and bioinformatics enabled the generation of commercial value from genetic resources without physical access to the underlying material. This created a significant loophole in the existing ABS architecture established under the Nagoya Protocol on Access to Genetic Resources and the Fair and Equitable Sharing of Benefits Arising from their Utilization to the CBD (the Nagoya Protocol).
This long-standing impasse shifted at COP16 (Cali, Colombia, November 2024), where Parties adopted Decision 16/2 establishing a multilateral mechanism to operationalise benefitsharing from DSI, reframing the debate from questions of legal classification to those of governance and implementation.
While progress has been made on ABS regarding sequence information of genetic resources at the CBD level, this has not been the case for plant genetic resources for food and agriculture (PGRFA). Target 13 of the Kunming–Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (KM–GBF) has created a narrow window of opportunity to develop a DSI benefit-sharing framework that is simple, harmonised, effective, and transformational (Halewood et al., 2023). As Parties move towards COP17 of the CBD, NBSAPs will have been finalised.
This paper argues that Target 13 will only succeed if benefit-sharing from DSI is mandatory, predictable, and front-loaded, and if lessons from failed multilateral ABS mechanisms— particularly the ITPGRFA—are explicitly integrated into the implementation of the CBD. It contends that reliance on voluntary contributions, narrow triggers, or deferred modalities risks reproducing structural inequalities under a new institutional guise. From an African civil society perspective, the paper outlines concrete priorities for COP17 and for the integration of Target 13 into NBSAPs.
Background
The fair and equitable sharing of benefits that arise from the utilisation of genetic resources is one of the three objectives of the CBD and remains central to its effective implementation.1
Under the Convention, the primary framework for implementing its third objective is set out in Article 15,2 which affirms states’ sovereign rights over their natural resources while establishing ABS obligations. In addition, Article 8(j) recognises the need to promote the equitable sharing of the benefits arising from the utilisation of traditional knowledge, innovations, and practices of IPLCs that are relevant to the conservation and sustainable use of biological diversity.3
Building on these foundations, several multilateral treaties have established or codified ABS systems, including the CBD (1992) and the Nagoya Protocol (2010); the ITPGRFA (2001); the World Health Organization (WHO) Pandemic Influenza Preparedness Framework (2011); and the Agreement on Marine Biological Diversity of Areas beyond National Jurisdiction (BBNJ) adopted in 2023 (Carlson et al., 2025). In particular, the adoption of the Nagoya Protocol was intended to create greater legal certainty, clarity, and transparency for both users and providers of genetic resources and associated traditional knowledge. However, over the last few decades, rapid technological advances—especially in relation to genetic sequence information (i.e., DSI)—have exposed significant gaps in these frameworks. In many cases, the treatment of sequence data was left ambiguous or deferred to national interpretation, generating persistent uncertainty and contestation in the implementation of ABS.
A major political shift occurred at COP15 in December 2022 when Parties agreed to pursue a dedicated solution for the sharing of benefits arising from the use of DSI under Target 13 of the KM–GBF. This decision effectively brought to a close the long-standing debate over whether DSI should be legally classified as genetic resources, redirecting attention towards mechanisms for governance and benefit-sharing. 4
Target 13 has emerged as the primary vehicle for giving substantive effect to the third objective of the CBD: equity and justice in the use of biodiversity. Although it sits alongside Targets 9–12 on sustainable use, in practice it has emerged as a central North–South and public-interest battleground, intersecting with questions of finance, knowledge extraction, indigenous rights, and control over emerging biotechnologies. These dynamics are particularly salient for regions such as Africa, where local communities maintain close socio-economic and cultural relationships with ecosystems and biodiversity, and where historical patterns of extraction continue to shape contemporary ABS debates (Knight et al., 2022).
1 See https://www.cbd.int/intro
2 See https://www.cbd.int/convention/articles/default.shtml?a=cbd-15
3 Article 8(j) of the CBD provides that, subject to its national legislation, Parties shall respect, preserve and maintain knowledge, innovations and practices of indigenous and local communities embodying traditional lifestyles relevant for the conservation and sustainable use of biological diversity and promote their wider application with the approval and involvement of the holders of such knowledge, innovations and practices and encourage the equitable sharing of the benefits arising from the utilzation of such knowledge, innovations and practices.
4 See https://www.cbd.int/gbf/targets/13
Target 13: Increase the sharing of benefits from genetic resources, digital sequence information, and traditional knowledge
Target 13 commits Parties to: Take effective legal, policy, administrative and capacity-building measures at all levels, as appropriate, to ensure the fair and equitable sharing of benefits that arise from the utilisation of genetic resources and from digital sequence information on genetic resources, as well as traditional knowledge associated with genetic resources, and facilitating appropriate access to genetic resources, and by 2030, facilitating a significant increase of the benefits shared, in accordance with applicable international access and benefit-sharing instruments.
While Target 13 builds on elements previously addressed under Aichi Biodiversity Target 16, the earlier target focused primarily on the ratification and implementation of the Nagoya Protocol and was therefore narrower in scope, both in terms of the ABS instruments covered and the types of measures envisaged. Despite this, Aichi Target 16 was only partially achieved (Secretariat of the CBD, 2020). The explicit inclusion of DSI in Target 13 represents a fundamental shift as it directly challenges business-as-usual models where genetic information is freely extracted, digitised, and commercialised with little or no return to provider countries or IPLCs. At the same time, significant uncertainties remain regarding how this target can be effectively realised, particularly given the existing ABS structures and the fact that DSI is already widely generated, shared, and used across borders.
ABS and DSI
Carlson et al. (2025:2099) observe that: “The history of colonialism is inseparable from the theft of both living organisms and scientific knowledge.” Although international law now recognises that national governments and Indigenous peoples hold sovereign rights to their genetic resources, including the authority to determine when and how these resources are used by others, these rights continue to be violated by states, corporations, and scientists alike (Carlson et al., 2025).
While the Nagoya Protocol to the CBD clarified certain expectations regarding ABS, its ambiguous language has created persistent challenges, including a lack of clear indicators for assessing effectiveness and compliance (Robinson & Wright, 2023). Neither the CBD nor the Nagoya Protocol obliges Parties to enact domestic ABS legislation; instead, both rely on a predominantly bilateral model in which ABS terms are negotiated between individual users and providers of genetic resources (Halewood et al., 2023). As of April 2026, the Nagoya Protocol has 142 Parties, yet uneven national implementation continues to undermine its capacity to deliver equitable outcomes in practice. 5
5 See https://www.cbd.int/abs/nagoya-protocol/signatories
In response to some shortcomings associated with the bilateral ABS approach, the ITPGRFA established a multilateral system (MLS) to pool plant genetic resources from 64 crops and forages, facilitating access for food and agriculture research and breeding across jurisdictions (Halewood et al., 2023). Benefit-sharing within the MLS is largely voluntary: commercial users are encouraged to make royalty payments to an international benefit-sharing fund only when products derived from accessed materials are not made available for further research and breeding. To date, very few commercial users have triggered this obligation, and aggregate voluntary contributions from Contracting parties and other users amount to approximately US$30 million, while seed companies generate multibillion-dollar annual revenues (Halewood et al., 2023; MacDonald et al., 2023).
Against this backdrop, COP16 adopted Decision 16/2, marking a landmark shift toward operationalising a multilateral benefit-sharing mechanism for the use of DSI on genetic resources, including the establishment of the Cali Fund. The Cali Fund was formally launched in 2025. This development followed earlier advances under BBNJ, which in February 2025 created the first international framework for managing DSI of marine genetic resources beyond national jurisdiction. More recently, the WHO Pandemic Agreement, adopted in May 2025, committed Parties to establishing a Pathogen ABS system. Despite their political significance, to date, only a single monetary contribution—US$1,000 from TierraViva—has been made to the Cali Fund.6
Decision 16/2 sets out four core elements (TWN, 2024):
(i) The adoption of an initial set of modalities, contained in an Annex;
(ii) The further development of additional modalities for adoption at COP17;
(iii) The operationalisation of monetary benefit-sharing through a global fund named the “Cali Fund”; and
(iv) exploration of potential tools and models, including databases, to ensure that DSI remains publicly available and accessible to all Parties in a transparent and accountable manner.
Taken together, these outcomes represent significant normative and political gains for developing countries. They establish, for the first time, a global mechanism to collect monetary benefits from the use of DSI, while explicitly safeguarding national sovereignty over genetic resources, including sequence information. Nevertheless, while progress has been achieved at the CBD level with respect to DSI governance, equivalent advances have not been realised for PGRFA, where benefit-sharing remains minimal despite extensive access and use (TWN, 2025).
6 See https://mptf.undp.org/fund/cal00#:~:text=Table_title:%20FinancialsFinancial%20Status%20Table_content:%20 header:%20%7C%20Total,deposits%20%7C%20$%20997:%2099.69%20%25%20%7C
ABS and the ITPGRFA: considerations for Target 13
In November 2025, the collapse of negotiations at the Eleventh Session Governing Body (GB-11) of the ITPGRFA in Lima once again exposed the structural weaknesses of multilateral ABS systems that prioritise facilitated access while deferring enforceable benefit-sharing obligations. After more than a decade of reform efforts, Parties were still unable to agree on mandatory user-based payment mechanisms to correct the MLS’s chronic failure to deliver meaningful benefit flows. This outcome serves as a clear warning for Target 13: a DSI mechanism that relies on voluntarism, narrow payment triggers, or political deferral is likely to reproduce the MLS’s core flaw—high levels of use and extraction alongside persistently inadequate returns to provider countries and communities.
The Lima impasse has laid bare the limits of sequencing arguments that ask provider countries to concede further access or regulatory flexibility in exchange for future, uncertain benefits. The refusal of many Global South Parties to proceed without concrete benefit-sharing reform mirrors growing resistance under the CBD to exemptions, weak contribution frameworks, and open-ended implementation timelines for DSI. For advocates of Target 13, the lesson is stark: political credibility depends on benefits being real, predictable, and delivered upfront. Without this, the Cali Fund risks following the same trajectory as the ITPGRFA Benefitsharing Fund—institutionally established, rhetorically defended, but structurally incapable of delivering the equity outcomes it was meant to secure.
Prior to the collapse of the negotiations in Lima, the Ad Hoc Open-Ended Working Group to Enhance the Functioning of the MLS of ABS had advanced a draft package of measures proposing to expand the scope of the MLS from 64 food crops to all PGRFA (Ramakrishnan, 2025). Considered at GB-11, this package was presented as a pathway to revitalise the ITPGRFA’s benefit-sharing architecture. However, the Parties’ subsequent failure to reach an agreement has underscored the proposal’s structural weakness. Rather than correcting the chronic imbalance between facilitated access and fair and equitable benefit-sharing, the reforms would have further widened this gap, weakened governance, undermined accountability and transparency, and eroded the already fragile rights of farmers in developing countries over the genetic resources they have cultivated for centuries, as well as national sovereignty over those resources. To date, despite facilitating access to millions of seed samples, the MLS has delivered negligible benefit-sharing outcomes: of more than seven million transfers of plant material to over 28,000 users since the Treaty’s inception, only six users have made monetary contributions to its Benefit-Sharing Fund (Ramakrishnan, 2025).
The collapse of the MLS reform process has also brought into sharper focus the entrenched opposition from developed countries to the explicit inclusion of DSI or genetic sequence data within the legal and contractual architecture of the ITPGRFA, including the Standard Material Transfer Agreement (SMTA). As reflected in the draft reform package, there remain no binding provisions governing the generation, storage, downstream use, or benefit-sharing arising from the use of DSI. This omission is particularly stark given that the proposed reforms sought to significantly expand the scope of the MLS without introducing corresponding enforceable benefit-sharing obligations for sequence-based uses. Developed countries continue to seek unrestricted access to DSI derived from MLS materials, without any requirement for an SMTA to regulate such access or ensure benefit-sharing, and they oppose proposals to prohibit the patenting of such DSI, despite these practices contravening Article 12.3(d)7 of the ITPGRFA and undermining the protection afforded to farmers’ rights under Article 12.3(e).8 Attempts to recognise DSI as an integral component of PGRFA have been consistently resisted, with some developed countries now advocating that benefit-sharing from DSI be addressed instead through the voluntary mechanism of the Cali Fund—an approach that, in light of the MLS’s own failures, risks perpetuating rather than remedying the structural inequities Target 13 was intended to confront.
7 Recipients shall not claim any intellectual property or other rights that limit the facilitated access to the plant genetic resources for food and agriculture, or their genetic parts or components, in the form received from the MLS.
8 Access to plant genetic resources for food and agriculture under development, including material being developed by farmers, shall be at the discretion of its developer, during the period of its development.
COP17 and Target 13 in NBSAPs
Through Target 13 of the KM–GBF, the international community faces a narrow but critical opportunity to establish a DSI benefit-sharing framework that is simple, harmonised, effective, and capable of delivering transformative outcomes. While the establishment of the Cali Fund under Decision 16/2 represents an important political milestone, its early operational record underscores the scale of the challenge ahead. To date, the Fund has received only a single monetary contribution, underscoring the risks of relying on voluntary contributions. This highlights the urgency of agreeing at COP17 on concrete, binding modalities that will enable the mechanism to function effectively in practice and deliver the objectives of Target 13, the Nagoya Protocol, and potentially complementary instruments such as the ITPGRFA.
Decision 16/2 took vital steps toward addressing long-standing failures and limitations in ABS mechanisms, particularly with respect to DSI. However, as Parties move toward COP17, it is essential that these political commitments be translated into enforceable outcomes. This includes the adoption of clear contribution thresholds and rates for the Cali Fund, agreement on transparent and equitable rules for allocating and disbursing funds, and the development of additional operational modalities to ensure the effective functioning of the multilateral DSI benefit-sharing mechanism. Therefore, we call on African civil society to hold governments accountable and support efforts to ensure this is resolved at COP17.
Decision16/2 provides the foundation upon which countries must now develop and finalise their NBSAPs with regard to Target 13. Within this process, African civil society has a critical role to play in advocating for lawful and equitable genetic sequence data governance and database engineering that aligns with open science principles while fully recognising the sovereign rights of states and the rights of IPLCs over their genetic resources. This requires engagement with evolving governance frameworks such as the FAIR,9 CARE,10 and TRUST11 principles, as well as the more recent LISTEN12 principles, which reflect ongoing efforts to reconcile open science with ethical, legal, and equity considerations in the governance of genetic sequence data (Carlson et al., 2025).
As currently envisaged, the Cali Fund states that 50% of resources are earmarked for direct disbursement to IPLCs, presenting a significant opportunity to channel benefits toward the custodians of biodiversity, provided that these commitments are realised through robust implementation, monitoring, and accountability mechanisms (CBD, UNEP, & UNDP, 2025). The Fund is also intended to support developing countries—particularly Least Developed Countries and Small Island Developing States—in implementing their NBSAPs. The headline indicators under Target 13 include measures on both monetary and non-monetary benefits, making it essential that countries clearly articulate, within their NBSAPs, how these benefits will be generated, shared, and utilised in ways that advance equitable and just biodiversity conservation. African civil society plays a critical role in this process.
9 Findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable
10 Collective benefit, authority to control, responsibility and ethics
11 Transparency, responsibility, user focus, sustainability and technology
Finally, as countries adopt and implement legal and policy measures to fulfil their ABS obligations, it is imperative that national frameworks explicitly recognise and give effect to the rights articulated in the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas. Such recognition is a necessary condition for IPLCs to meaningfully exercise their rights over genetic resources and associated traditional knowledge and to benefit equitably from mechanisms established under Target 13 (Berne Declaration et al., 2013). Therefore, in the lead-up to and following COP17, African civil society must continue to push for the recognition and realisation of the rights of IPLCs, including smallholder farming communities, to make ABS effective and meaningful for equitable use and conservation of biodiversity and its associated knowledge, which will have implications for realising Target 13, the Nagoya Protocol, and the ITPGRFA.
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