Submitted by Ronnie Hall on
At the 17th meeting of the Conference of the Parties (COP17) to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) in Yerevan, Armenia (19–30 October 2026), governments will make decisions that could fundamentally reshape the international governance of synthetic biology. At the centre of the negotiations is the proposed Thematic Action Plan—a framework intended to guide capacity-building, technology transfer, research, knowledge-sharing, and regulation in this rapidly expanding field.
Developing countries have urgent and legitimate needs for finance, scientific knowledge, technology, infrastructure, and regulatory capacity to protect biodiversity and exercise sovereign control over emerging technologies. But these needs must not be used to draw them into donor-driven research programmes, proprietary platforms, or commercial partnerships that create new dependencies. Capacity-building must strengthen independent assessment, biosafety, regulation, monitoring, liability, and the power to refuse—not prepare the ground for synthetic biology uptake and deployment.
The stakes are urgent. Rather than confronting the structural drivers of biodiversity loss—including industrial agriculture, extractivism, corporate concentration, pollution, habitat destruction, and dispossession—the Action Plan could divert scarce public resources towards technological fixes that leave these destructive systems intact. It risks granting synthetic biology legitimacy, finance, and institutional support as a biodiversity “solution” before fundamental questions of ecological harm, rights, sovereignty, liability, and corporate control have been resolved. Driven by digitalisation, artificial intelligence, and proprietary platforms, synthetic biology could deepen the enclosure of life, facilitate the appropriation of genetic resources and traditional knowledge, and further undermine food and seed sovereignty.
This briefing identifies the safeguards that governments and civil society must urgently defend and maps them directly onto the contested negotiating text. Its message is unequivocal: the CBD must not become a vehicle for normalising and financing the engineering of life. Biodiversity governance must uphold precaution, democratic accountability, and the sovereign right of countries and communities to assess, regulate, and refuse these technologies—while directing resources towards agroecology, community-led conservation, and other locally determined responses that address the roots of biodiversity loss.
This briefing was produced through a collaborative effort by the African Centre for Biodiversity, Third World Network, EcoNexus, Friends of the Earth US, ETC Group, Society for International Development, Alianza Biodiversidad, and POLLINIS.
Cover art: She Who Holds by Hlavutelo Ngobeni
Photo: Tom Mesic/Ars Electronica, Flickr
