During the COVID-19 pandemic the international community repeatedly called for the equitable distribution of vaccines and other medical countermeasures. However, there was a substantial gap between this rhetoric and State action. High-income countries secured significantly more doses than they required, leaving many low-income countries unable to vaccinate their populations. Current negotiations for the new Pandemic Treaty under the World Health Organization (WHO) attempt to narrow the gap between rhetoric and behaviour by building the concept of equity into the Treaty's substantive content. However, equity is difficult to define, much less to operationalize. Presently, WHO Member States appear to have chosen ‘access and benefit-sharing’ (ABS) as the predominant mechanism for operationalizing equity in the Treaty. This article examines ABS as a mechanism, its use in public health, and argues that ABS is fundamentally flawed, unable to achieve equity. It proposes other options for an equitable international response to future pandemic threats.

Access and benefit sharing (ABS) is a transactional mechanism designed to allow countries to trade access to their sovereign genetic resources for monetary and non-monetary benefits, with the ultimate goal of channelling those benefits into sustainable development and environmental conservation. Arguments about how pathogens are not the sort of genetic resources the world ought to conserve eventually gave way to a recognition that pathogens are indeed sovereign genetic resources under the Convention on Biological Diversity and its Nagoya Protocol, and that the ABS transaction may be an effective way to deliver scarce vaccines to developing nations as benefits received in exchange for shared pathogen samples. This article argues that categorising vaccines as benefits given in exchange for access to pathogen samples creates opposing incentives for providers and users of virus samples and undermines the human right to health because it makes that right a commodity to be bought. The provision of pathogen samples to the global research commons and the fair and equitable distribution of medicines should be two parallel public goods to be pursued as goals in and of themselves. We conclude that the linking of these goals through the ABS transaction should be reassessed.

The 1992 Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) and its 2010 Nagoya Protocol brought about a breakthrough in global policy making. They combined a concern for the environment with a commitment to resolving longstanding human injustices regarding access to, and use of biological resources. In particular, the traditional knowledge of indigenous communities was no longer going to be exploited without fair benefit sharing. Yet, for 25 years after the adoption of the CBD, there were no major benefit sharing agreements that led to significant funding streams for indigenous communities. This changed with the signing of the Rooibos Benefit Sharing Agreement in South Africa, described in this paper. As the authors report, the Rooibos Agreement is a superlative in two respects. It is the biggest benefit sharing agreement between industry and indigenous peoples to date. It is also the first industry-wide agreement to be formed in accordance with biodiversity legislation. This article is a co-production between traditional knowledge holders, the lawyer who represented their interests, the Co-Chair of the Nagoya Protocol negotiations, and an ethicist who analyzed the major challenges of this historic agreement. With no precedent in the benefit sharing world, the agreement stands as a concrete example of the ‘art of the possible.’ Although the rooibos case is unique in a number of aspects, the experience offers many transferable insights, including: patience; incrementalism; honesty; trust; genuine dialogue; strong legal support; a shared recognition that a fair, win-win deal is possible; government leadership; and unity amongst indigenous peoples. Such ingredients of success can apply well beyond southern Africa.

As part of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), the Nagoya Protocol on Access and Benefit Sharing calls for ‘fair and equitable sharing of benefits’ derived from the use of genetic resources and traditional knowledge. However, implementation of the Convention and the Nagoya Protocol has been challenged by the inadequacies of existing policies, lack of national-level frameworks, and inadequate knowledge among stakeholders. We used focus group meetings and structured interviews with rural communities, government representatives, researchers and Members of Parliament in Bhutan to collect data on awareness, knowledge and perceptions of components of the CBD related to access and benefit sharing. Our study indicated generally low levels of awareness about most components of the Convention, particularly among rural residents. Although local people in rural communities feel that benefits derived from local biological resources and traditional knowledge should be shared, there is uncertainty about who owns these resources. These results indicate that there is an urgent need to develop educational and awareness programmes, using a variety of media, to target particular stakeholder groups, with emphasis on residents in rural communities. This could empower local communities to participate meaningfully in decision-making processes to develop Bhutan's national access and benefit sharing framework, and to allow them to benefit from the conservation and sustainable use of local resources.

Research on emerging infectious diseases calls for a work on collections of pathogens (including hosts or vectors from which the pathogens were isolated), related to human and animal health, to wildlife or on the environmental material. In this respect, the adoption of a One Health perspective is determined by the need for a common approach to consider the collection, storage and use of pathogens coming from human or non-human sources, and particularly when the same pathogen is taken from different environments. In response to this development, our purpose is to delineate a flexible regulation framework concerning collections of pathogens from various origins or hosts and their associated data in order to facilitate scientific work and research partnerships. The legal and ethical cutting-edge research on Biomedical Big Data is particularly stimulating when it comes to address challenges related to collections or biobanks of pathogens such as prior informed consent and accessibility, Material Transfer Agreement or benefit sharing.

The equitable sharing of benefits from natural resources is a key target of the Convention on Biological Diversity. Trade in its native species is one way in which a country can potentially benefit from its natural resources, and even small-scale traders can now access global markets online. However, little is known about the extent of benefit sharing for many products, and the extent to which the appropriate processes and permits are being used. We surveyed online trade in a lucrative and widely sold product in Southeast Asia (horticultural orchids) to assess the extent of access and benefit sharing. In total, 20.8% (n = 1120) of orchid species from the region were being sold. Although seven out of ten countries were trading, five had very little or no trade in their native species, and the majority of recently described endemic species being traded from non-range states had no reported Convention on the International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora exports from their country of origin. We suggest that addressing access and benefit-sharing gaps requires wider recognition of the problem, coupled with capacity building in the countries currently benefitting least: Laos, Myanmar and Cambodia. The priority should be to increase botanical capacity and enable these countries to better control the commercialization and trade of their native species.

This article links the concept of access and benefit-sharing as it pertains to crop genetic resources to climate change adaptation and argues that systems for access and benefit-sharing can, and should, be designed to contribute to climate change adaptation for agriculture. The access and benefit-sharing provisions of the two international agreements that together provide the international legal framework for access and benefit-sharing – the Convention on Biological Diversity (with its Nagoya Protocol) and the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture – are presented and analysed. How these agreements are implemented is central to adaptation, as the effects of climate change threaten crop genetic resources and future adaptive capacity, and, if properly maintained and utilized, crop genetic resources will be essential to climate change adaptation across the globe. This article, therefore, argues that an important adaptation strategy linked to such implementation is to direct benefit-sharing for crop genetic resources towards adaptation efforts and to ensure facilitated and efficient access to crop genetic resources for adaptation purposes. Some options for how this can be pursued at both the international and national level are offered.