I’m psyched to see someone writing about this on the EA Forum! I think it will become really important over long time horizons, and it’s good to see attention on the precedent being set.
That being said, I don’t think the overall frame is accurate.
When value is built out of a resource and the knowledge attached to it, and both came from a particular people who were not asked and not compensated, those people have a fair claim on part of that value.
I don’t think it makes moral sense to compensate local peoples for the future usefulness of the species they live next to. It might be a practical solution to a redistribution problem, but not a great one. Think of it acting in reverse: would we compensate colonial nations for living near valuable species? Relatedly, I think the CBD was mostly making it explicit that countries can and will pull up the drawbridge on the biological value contained within their borders — not necessarily recognizing their moral due for hosting it.
Where the value comes from
Trying to attribute a given product back to a given dataset is not just hard, it is close to meaningless, and the cost of trying would swallow whatever benefit you meant to share.
I think you might have missed something here. The majority of the value does not come from the individual species or even the dataset. The majority of the value comes from the search, and from the comparison between datapoints. Most of the value doesn’t exist before the research makes sense of the data and brings value into existence. Saying it’s “meaningless” to compensate the individual data points isn’t just saying it’s hard, it’s saying the data isn’t the source of most of the value.
It’s like saying the value of a staircase comes from the rocks used to build it. The rocks were not valuable laying strewn about before. The value comes from the work of taking valueless rocks and arranging them into something useful.
The value is in the life-saving medicine. It comes from the delivery drivers, the factories, the human testing, the shelf life testing, the dosage measuring, the production line specialization, the model training, isolating the compounds, the data storage, the sequencing, and the specimen collecting (the data access). The value doesn’t just come from the species itself and its caretakers. This article makes it sound like it’s about a short “distance between … the clean lab and the muddy dig.” Indigenous knowledge that performed this search is hugely valuable as I go into a bit later. But a great deal of value comes from converting the original compound to something that can be used as a cure.
Biodiversity is not very valuable relative to the work to extract it
Bioprospecting pharmaceutical companies previously got to keep 100% of the revenue, and they stopped bioprospecting because it was not paying for itself with jackpot medicines. That said, I expect revenue for bioscience and bioprospecting to grow a lot soon, so it’s a good idea to anticipate that and set up proper regulation and compensation, potentially in the form of benefit sharing.
Nothing is being taken
“the biological material and the data taken from it leave regions that have long been marginalized, while the patents and the money stay in the North.” “the benefit taken, including future benefits, monetary and otherwise”
The species is still there and the current indigenous inhabitants were not going to start a business to produce medicine in their lifetime (they did not lose out on the IP). The species knowledge (is usually?) published and made available to them.
The communities of Madagascar got the existence of treatments for childhood leukemia and Hodgkin’s disease, and documentation on their local species. This is not valuable to them now, but it will be valuable to them in the future. (similar to the lost IP opportunity) I’m not trying to claim this is fair, just pointing out that there is some benefit flow in reverse: in the future the local people can also benefit from the public databases and medical advancements. “Future value” applies both ways.
I’m failing to get at the central issue that knowledge is highly valuable but isn’t traded in the same way as goods…
I think I’m overarguing my actual stance. To be clear, I think we should compensate for stewardship and sharing of knowledge more than we are.
Compensation for value
Indigenous knowledge is the right target for compensation: When local knowledge points at the one plant that does something, it has already done the work that costs a fortune. That is value creation, same as training the AI models. And the evidence is there too: pharmaceutical companies pursue bioprospecting when they have a lead from indigenous knowledge.
Ambiguous negotiation requirements
A flat rate is important. It avoids imposing large costs on many barely affordable public-good-generating scientific excursions. (Which I believe are a great source of un-compensated value in aggregate.) But adding ambiguous requirements about consent and fund contribution removes the benefits of a flat rate! Ambiguous requirements cause ratcheting and perpetual re-negotiations. Even though they sound free and don’t carry a price tag, they are far more costly than the fees themselves, and more costly than the extractive value gained from studying species in the vast majority of cases.
Three repurcussions from vagueness harm the people they are supposed to be providing benefit sharing to: Process costs are cheaper per project for whoever can industrialize them, so the rules favor large lawyered-up ventures over small field teams. Documented provenance becomes a liability, so the rewarded behavior is to obscure it — the honest researcher who records where a sample came from takes on an obligation that evasive one isn’t burdened by. And field sites get chosen for legal clarity, so the places with the least capacity to write clear rules get less science rather than more benefit sharing. It hits non-centralized societies the hardest: it is much harder to negotiate with a whole village than with a pre-structured bureaucratic papertrail.
This harms the people it’s meant to help
From what I understand, the majority of current benefits come from cooperation: local hiring, field assistants, researchers present and spending, species described before they’re gone, and local capacity built so a place can start doing its own research.
All of that requires researchers showing up. A lone researcher can’t be a one-person diplomatic corps in every country without a simplified published procedure for hosting an expedition, so they go somewhere that has one. The species go undescribed, and value flows less in both directions.
De-Extinction:
De-extinction is also not going to be profit generating. Colossal is about the hype of doing something for the first time; businesses won’t make money continuing to de-extinct entire species. In fact conservation stands to gain from these early hype projects, because the expensive research steps will be paved for the conservation managers who will take over the work.
Extinct species also typically have less surviving knowledge and less stewardship, so those reasons for compensation are weaker.
What I agree with
It’s hard to track who stewarded, but that doesn’t change the altruistic behaviour and the world’s benefit. Keeping species alive instead of eradicating them is costly, and that should be compensated. Probably by a fee for use of datasets? (Not for gathering and building datasets, which are community-good-generating exercise...)
Compensation for knowledge is often paid lower than its true value, and individuals/communities aren’t empowered to negotiate for its true worth. This is wrong.
There should be a transfer of wealth from rich, biodiversity-impoverished nations to poor, biodiversity-abundant nations.
Research and publication should be encouraged in far-flung, un-centralized places — it’s too hard, and it’s neglecting entire regions of the globe.
I emphatically agree we need to see what communities actually receive under a fund model, a royalty model, and no compensation at all (where lower friction might increase research and thereby local hiring, field assistants, species described before they’re gone, and local capacity built).
Forgive me for some flaws in my response, I struggled a bit with how the arguments were presented and am imperfectly attempting to disentangle some points.
I’m psyched to see someone writing about this on the EA Forum! I think it will become really important over long time horizons, and it’s good to see attention on the precedent being set.
That being said, I don’t think the overall frame is accurate.
I don’t think it makes moral sense to compensate local peoples for the future usefulness of the species they live next to. It might be a practical solution to a redistribution problem, but not a great one. Think of it acting in reverse: would we compensate colonial nations for living near valuable species? Relatedly, I think the CBD was mostly making it explicit that countries can and will pull up the drawbridge on the biological value contained within their borders — not necessarily recognizing their moral due for hosting it.
Where the value comes from
I think you might have missed something here. The majority of the value does not come from the individual species or even the dataset. The majority of the value comes from the search, and from the comparison between datapoints. Most of the value doesn’t exist before the research makes sense of the data and brings value into existence. Saying it’s “meaningless” to compensate the individual data points isn’t just saying it’s hard, it’s saying the data isn’t the source of most of the value.
It’s like saying the value of a staircase comes from the rocks used to build it. The rocks were not valuable laying strewn about before. The value comes from the work of taking valueless rocks and arranging them into something useful.
The value is in the life-saving medicine. It comes from the delivery drivers, the factories, the human testing, the shelf life testing, the dosage measuring, the production line specialization, the model training, isolating the compounds, the data storage, the sequencing, and the specimen collecting (the data access). The value doesn’t just come from the species itself and its caretakers. This article makes it sound like it’s about a short “distance between … the clean lab and the muddy dig.” Indigenous knowledge that performed this search is hugely valuable as I go into a bit later. But a great deal of value comes from converting the original compound to something that can be used as a cure.
Biodiversity is not very valuable relative to the work to extract it
Bioprospecting pharmaceutical companies previously got to keep 100% of the revenue, and they stopped bioprospecting because it was not paying for itself with jackpot medicines. That said, I expect revenue for bioscience and bioprospecting to grow a lot soon, so it’s a good idea to anticipate that and set up proper regulation and compensation, potentially in the form of benefit sharing.
Nothing is being taken
The species is still there and the current indigenous inhabitants were not going to start a business to produce medicine in their lifetime (they did not lose out on the IP). The species knowledge (is usually?) published and made available to them.
The communities of Madagascar got the existence of treatments for childhood leukemia and Hodgkin’s disease, and documentation on their local species. This is not valuable to them now, but it will be valuable to them in the future. (similar to the lost IP opportunity) I’m not trying to claim this is fair, just pointing out that there is some benefit flow in reverse: in the future the local people can also benefit from the public databases and medical advancements. “Future value” applies both ways.
I’m failing to get at the central issue that knowledge is highly valuable but isn’t traded in the same way as goods…
I think I’m overarguing my actual stance. To be clear, I think we should compensate for stewardship and sharing of knowledge more than we are.
Compensation for value
Indigenous knowledge is the right target for compensation: When local knowledge points at the one plant that does something, it has already done the work that costs a fortune. That is value creation, same as training the AI models. And the evidence is there too: pharmaceutical companies pursue bioprospecting when they have a lead from indigenous knowledge.
Ambiguous negotiation requirements
A flat rate is important. It avoids imposing large costs on many barely affordable public-good-generating scientific excursions. (Which I believe are a great source of un-compensated value in aggregate.) But adding ambiguous requirements about consent and fund contribution removes the benefits of a flat rate! Ambiguous requirements cause ratcheting and perpetual re-negotiations. Even though they sound free and don’t carry a price tag, they are far more costly than the fees themselves, and more costly than the extractive value gained from studying species in the vast majority of cases.
Three repurcussions from vagueness harm the people they are supposed to be providing benefit sharing to: Process costs are cheaper per project for whoever can industrialize them, so the rules favor large lawyered-up ventures over small field teams. Documented provenance becomes a liability, so the rewarded behavior is to obscure it — the honest researcher who records where a sample came from takes on an obligation that evasive one isn’t burdened by. And field sites get chosen for legal clarity, so the places with the least capacity to write clear rules get less science rather than more benefit sharing. It hits non-centralized societies the hardest: it is much harder to negotiate with a whole village than with a pre-structured bureaucratic papertrail.
This harms the people it’s meant to help
From what I understand, the majority of current benefits come from cooperation: local hiring, field assistants, researchers present and spending, species described before they’re gone, and local capacity built so a place can start doing its own research.
All of that requires researchers showing up. A lone researcher can’t be a one-person diplomatic corps in every country without a simplified published procedure for hosting an expedition, so they go somewhere that has one. The species go undescribed, and value flows less in both directions.
De-Extinction:
De-extinction is also not going to be profit generating. Colossal is about the hype of doing something for the first time; businesses won’t make money continuing to de-extinct entire species. In fact conservation stands to gain from these early hype projects, because the expensive research steps will be paved for the conservation managers who will take over the work.
Extinct species also typically have less surviving knowledge and less stewardship, so those reasons for compensation are weaker.
What I agree with
It’s hard to track who stewarded, but that doesn’t change the altruistic behaviour and the world’s benefit. Keeping species alive instead of eradicating them is costly, and that should be compensated. Probably by a fee for use of datasets? (Not for gathering and building datasets, which are community-good-generating exercise...)
Compensation for knowledge is often paid lower than its true value, and individuals/communities aren’t empowered to negotiate for its true worth. This is wrong.
There should be a transfer of wealth from rich, biodiversity-impoverished nations to poor, biodiversity-abundant nations.
Research and publication should be encouraged in far-flung, un-centralized places — it’s too hard, and it’s neglecting entire regions of the globe.
I emphatically agree we need to see what communities actually receive under a fund model, a royalty model, and no compensation at all (where lower friction might increase research and thereby local hiring, field assistants, species described before they’re gone, and local capacity built).
Forgive me for some flaws in my response, I struggled a bit with how the arguments were presented and am imperfectly attempting to disentangle some points.