Cali Fund draws limited biodiversity payments as pharma faces scrutiny

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Cali Fund biodiversity payments

Highlights

The Cali Fund has received only $10,656 in commitments, with $7,085 deposited, far below its $1bn annual goal for conservation financing.
No major pharmaceutical company has contributed to the Cali Fund, despite these firms generating about $161bn in profits in 2025 and relying on genetic resources.
Zero Carbon Analytics estimates the top 15 pharmaceutical companies could have contributed $756m if following the fund's voluntary guidance of 1% of profits or 0.1% of revenue.

Fundraising gap emerges at Cop17

As first reported by The Guardian, the Cali Fund had received $10,656 in commitments as of Monday, with $7,085 deposited, even though it was created to raise $1bn a year from companies that benefit from nature's genetic resources.

The fund is under discussion this week at the UN biodiversity conference, Cop17, in Yerevan, Armenia, as governments and stakeholders seek ways to narrow a wider $700bn financing gap for global conservation. At least half of the fund's money is meant to support priorities identified by Indigenous peoples and local communities in lower-income countries.

June Rubis of Macquarie University, an Indigenous peoples and local communities representative from Asia who sits on the Cali Fund's steering committee, said pharmaceutical companies are "free-riding" on nature. She said the businesses do not appear to recognize the importance of protecting biodiversity or supporting communities that have long defended it.

Pharma sector contribution under focus

Industry participation could be decisive for the fund because drugmakers rely on genetic information from organisms around the world to develop new treatments. No major pharmaceutical company has so far contributed money to the fund, according to the report.

Zero Carbon Analytics said the top 15 pharmaceutical companies could have contributed $756m based on last year's performance if they had followed the fund's voluntary guidance of donating 1% of profits or 0.1% of revenue. Its research also found that the same 15 companies generated about $161bn in profits in 2025, while the total sum they gave shareholders that year was 175 times larger than the suggested Cali Fund contribution.

Victoria Kalyvas, who wrote the Zero Carbon Analytics analysis, said the future of health is tied to nature's DNA and warned that the pharmaceutical industry, along with patients, stands to lose from biodiversity destruction.

In our earlier article, we covered AstraZeneca’s multi-year AI-driven drug discovery partnership with insitro, aimed at improving early-stage research in hard-to-treat liver and heart diseases. We outlined how insitro’s “Virtual Human” platform is used to identify biological targets and advance them to development candidates, while AstraZeneca funds and runs subsequent clinical trials.

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