Nagoya Bites

The ABS Clearing House (ABSCH) is a very important instrument in the Access and Benefit-sharing (ABS) world. It is an international information sharing platform and the go-to resource for researchers to find out how to legally obtain access to material in provider countries.

In this episode, we speak to Matthew Dias who is the Program Officer responsible for the ABSCH at the Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). He walks the listeners through the different types of information that can be found in the Clearing House and gives some helpful tips for its use.

Regulation (EU) No 511/2014, or the EU Regulation for short, creates compliance obligations for researchers conducting “utilization” with certain genetic resources.

The term utilization is a difficult one to understand, making it challenging for many researchers to understand what type of research is covered by the EU Regulation. The good news is that the new Guidance Document from the EU Commission provides detailed insight into this concept and a number of examples of research which is and which is not considered to be utilization.

In this episode of “Nagoya Bites!”, our guest is Chris Lyal, who is a scientific associate at the Natural History Museum in London and taxonomist by training, walks us through the concept of utilization, provides insight into the new EU Guidance document and talks about the examples of taxonomy, phylogenetic analyses and sequencing and whether these are to be understood as utilization or not.

This podcast focuses on understanding the scope of Regulation (EU) No 511/2014, or the EU Regulation for short. This is important for researchers because those that fall within its scope have so-called due diligence obligations that need to be fulfilled.

In this episode, we speak to Martin Brink who works at the Centre for Genetic Resources of the Netherlands (CGN), which forms part of Wageningen University & Research (WUR). He is the National Focal Point on ABS for the Netherlands and regularly deals with enquiries from researchers about the Regulation and what it means for them in practice.

We discuss how to work out whether the EU Regulation applies to your or not and Martin introduces a tool created by the Dutch National Focal Point to support researchers with this process.

The compliance obligations arising from Regulation (EU) No 511/2014 do not only apply to individuals but also to institutions like universities and research institutions where researchers work. Finding a good institutional compliance strategy can be challenging but some institutions have already made good progress in this area.

Since 2020, a number of academic institutions have been checked for compliance with Regulation (EU) No 511/2014 by the German competent authority, the German Federal Agency for Nature Conservation (Bundesamt für Naturschutz, BfN).

In this podcast, we speak to the head of the Nagoya Unit at the BfN about these checks, their purpose, the process and some of the lessons learned.