The Convention on Biological Diversity: Protecting Global Biodiversity

Every year, species vanish from the planet at a pace far faster than natural extinction rates. Forests shrink, coral reefs bleach, and entire ecosystems collapse under the weight of human activity. Recognising that no single nation could tackle this crisis alone, the world came together in 1992 to forge a landmark agreement. The Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) became the first global treaty to treat the protection of life on Earth as a shared responsibility, while also wrestling with a difficult question: who gets to benefit from nature’s resources, and how?

What is the Convention on Biological Diversity? 🔗

The Convention on Biological Diversity is a multilateral treaty opened for signature at the 1992 Rio Earth Summit, formally the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development. It entered into force on 29 December 1993, and today nearly every country in the world is a party to it. The treaty grew out of a late-1980s recognition that biodiversity is a global asset of immense value, yet the threats to species and ecosystems were accelerating at an alarming rate.

The CBD was one of three treaties to emerge from Rio, alongside the climate change framework (UNFCCC) and the convention to combat desertification (UNCCD). Together these are known as the Rio Conventions, and they reflect a united approach to the interconnected crises of biodiversity loss, climate change, and land degradation.

The three core objectives 🔗

The Convention rests on three main objectives that have guided global biodiversity policy for over three decades:

Conservation of biological diversity: Protecting the variety of ecosystems, species, and genetic material that make up life on Earth. This involves preventing species extinction and maintaining protected habitats.

Sustainable use of its components: Ensuring that natural resources are used in a way that does not lead to long-term decline. The idea is to use biodiversity without overexploiting it, so future generations inherit a functioning natural world.

Fair and equitable sharing of benefits: Making sure that the benefits arising from genetic resources, such as commercial profits from a plant-based medicine, are shared fairly with the country and communities that provided those resources.

Why biodiversity needed its own treaty 🔗

Biological resources are fundamental to economic and social development. Medicines, crops, industrial materials, and even the air we breathe depend on the diversity of life. Yet for most of modern history, genetic resources were treated as a “common heritage of mankind”, freely available to anyone who could exploit them. In practice, this often meant that resources and traditional knowledge from biodiversity-rich developing nations were taken, patented, and commercialised by companies in wealthier countries, with no compensation flowing back.

The CBD changed this logic. It reaffirmed that nations hold sovereign rights over the biological resources within their territory. This was a major shift. A country could now control and monitor access to its genetic resources, and demand a share of any benefits derived from them. For developing countries, many of which are rich in biodiversity but limited in technology and capital, this principle was central to the entire agreement.

The conflict between conservation and use 🔗

At the heart of the CBD lies a genuine tension. On one side is the desire to conserve nature for its own sake and for future generations. On the other is the reality that people, communities, and economies depend on using biological resources to survive and grow. A blanket ban on use is neither realistic nor fair, especially for developing nations still working to lift people out of poverty.

The Convention tries to balance these competing interests. Rather than treating conservation and utilisation as opposites, it frames sustainable use as the bridge between them. The goal is not to lock nature away, but to use it wisely while ensuring the benefits are distributed justly. This balancing act between the interests of developed and developing countries runs through every part of the treaty’s history.

The protocols that strengthened the CBD 🔗

The Convention itself is a framework treaty, setting out broad principles. To give those principles legal teeth, parties negotiated two supplementary agreements known as protocols.

The Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety 🔗

Adopted in 2000, the Cartagena Protocol addresses the safe handling, transfer, and use of living modified organisms (LMOs) produced through modern biotechnology. Its concern is whether genetically modified organisms might harm biodiversity or human health when moved across borders. The protocol allows countries to make informed decisions before importing such organisms.

The Nagoya Protocol on access and benefit-sharing 🔗

Adopted in 2010 in Nagoya, Japan, and entering into force in 2014, the Nagoya Protocol is the legal engine behind the CBD’s third objective. It provides a transparent framework for access and benefit-sharing, commonly abbreviated as ABS. The protocol rests on two pillars: the sovereign right of countries over their genetic resources, and the obligation of users to comply with the rules when accessing them.

In practical terms, anyone wanting to use a country’s genetic resources must obtain prior informed consent (PIC) and negotiate mutually agreed terms (MAT) for sharing benefits. Crucially, the protocol also covers traditional knowledge held by indigenous and local communities, requiring that those communities be appropriately consulted and compensated. This was a direct response to the long-standing problem of biopiracy.

Biopiracy and the fight over traditional knowledge 🔗

Biopiracy refers to the practice where corporations or research institutions patent genetic resources or indigenous knowledge, often taken from developing countries, without prior informed consent or fair benefit-sharing. For a biodiversity-rich nation with deep traditions of using plants and herbs, this is not an abstract problem. Several high-profile cases illustrate exactly what the CBD and Nagoya Protocol were designed to prevent.

The turmeric and neem cases 🔗

In 1995, the United States Patent and Trademark Office granted a patent to researchers at the University of Mississippi for using turmeric to heal wounds, a practice known in households for generations. The Council of Scientific and Industrial Research challenged the patent by presenting ancient Sanskrit manuscripts as evidence of prior knowledge, and the patent was revoked in 1997. It became one of the first successful international challenges grounded in traditional knowledge.

A similar battle unfolded over neem. The European Patent Office had granted a patent for a neem oil-based antifungal product to W.R. Grace & Co. Government agencies and campaigners demonstrated that neem’s pesticidal properties had been common knowledge in agriculture for centuries, and the patent was eventually revoked. The basmati rice dispute with the firm RiceTec followed a comparable pattern.

Building a defence at home 🔗

These cases pushed the country to build its own protective machinery. The Traditional Knowledge Digital Library, launched in 2001, documents hundreds of thousands of formulations from classical texts so patent examiners worldwide can recognise existing knowledge and reject dubious claims. It has since become a global benchmark.

The Biological Diversity Act of 2002 created the legal framework to implement the CBD domestically, establishing the National Biodiversity Authority to regulate access to biological resources and ensure benefit-sharing. This Act was later updated through the Biological Diversity (Amendment) Act of 2023, which sought to simplify compliance for domestic researchers and companies while maintaining safeguards against biopiracy.

From Aichi Targets to the Global Biodiversity Framework 🔗

Setting principles is one thing; achieving measurable results is another. In 2010, parties adopted the Aichi Biodiversity Targets, a set of 20 goals for the decade ahead. By 2020, however, not a single target had been fully met, a sobering reminder of how difficult global coordination can be.

Learning from this, parties adopted the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework at COP15 in December 2022. Described by some as a “Paris moment for biodiversity”, the framework sets out four long-term goals for 2050 and 23 action-oriented targets for 2030.

The 30×30 commitment 🔗

The most widely cited element is the “30 by 30” target, which commits governments to protect at least 30 percent of the world’s land and marine areas by 2030. The framework also calls for restoring degraded ecosystems, phasing out harmful subsidies, and closing the biodiversity finance gap estimated at around 700 billion dollars per year. As with earlier targets, the central challenge will be turning these ambitious commitments into real action on the ground.

Ongoing challenges and unresolved tensions 🔗

More than three decades after Rio, the CBD continues to grapple with the same fundamental conflicts. Benefit-sharing remains contested, particularly with the rise of digital sequence information, where genetic data can be used without physically accessing a plant or animal. Negotiations over how to fairly compensate source countries in this digital age are still evolving.

Indigenous and local communities continue to push for stronger recognition of their rights, both as holders of traditional knowledge and as guardians of much of the world’s remaining biodiversity. Meanwhile, the underlying divide between developed and developing nations over technology, finance, and responsibility shapes every negotiation. The CBD shows that protecting biodiversity is never purely an environmental matter; it is deeply tied to economics, equity, and justice.

What do you think? Should genetic resources be treated as the sovereign property of individual nations, or as a shared heritage of humanity? And as biotechnology advances, how can the world ensure that the communities who first nurtured a plant or its knowledge receive a fair share of the benefits?

References

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convention_on_Biological_Diversity
2. https://www.unccd.int/convention/partners/rio-conventions
3. https://enb.iisd.org/negotiations/convention-biological-diversity-cbd
4. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9971722/
5. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10814485/
6. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nagoya_Protocol
7. https://chambers.com/articles/safeguarding-traditional-knowledge-under-indian-patent-law-can-legal-frameworks-keep-pace
8. https://www.iam-media.com/article/biopiracy-in-india-scientific-eruption-or-traditional-disruption
9. https://www.legacyias.com/biopiracy-neem-turmeric-case-studies-upsc-notes/
10. https://www.unep.org/resources/kunming-montreal-global-biodiversity-framework
11. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kunming-Montreal_Global_Biodiversity_Framework