Digital data and the Cali Fund

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What is digital sequence information?

When scientists read a plant's genes, the result is data: long strings of letters describing its DNA and the molecules it makes. That data can be stored in public databases and used by anyone, anywhere, without ever touching the plant again. This is what is meant by digital sequence information, or DSI.

It creates a hard question for fairness. The old rules on access and benefit-sharing were written for physical specimens, a leaf, a seed, a sample. But if a company can build a valuable product from a country's genetic data alone, never taking a physical plant, does anything return to that country? For years, the answer was unclear.

The value moved from the plant to the data. For a long time, the rules did not follow.

What the Cali Fund changed

In 2022, governments agreed the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, and in 2024, at the summit in Cali, they created a practical mechanism to answer the question. The Cali Fund is a shared, multilateral fund: companies that draw significant commercial benefit from digital sequence data contribute to it, and the money supports biodiversity and the communities that steward it.

The principle is simple and important: benefit-sharing now follows the data, not only the specimen. Using a country's genetic information carries a responsibility to give something back, even when no physical sample changes hands.

Why it matters for Madagascar

For a country whose flora is as distinctive as Madagascar's, this matters a great deal. Its genetic data is uniquely valuable precisely because so much of it exists nowhere else. The Cali Fund is one way the value of that data can return to the country and its people, rather than flowing out as it once did with the rose periwinkle.