by Joann Sy (Pollinis)
As Parties take up synthetic biology at COP17, a quiet shift is under way: synthetic biology is being reframed as a conservation tool. Yet the reframing itself is not on the table. The underlying question is rarely asked: is this the kind of conservation we want?
Conservation has traditionally rested on a simple idea: if we protect habitats and reduce the pressures on them, nature can recover. Its work has been to maintain the ecological and evolutionary processes that allow biodiversity to adapt and persist, and to direct effort and funding at the root causes of loss.
Synthetic biology starts from a different place. It treats the organism itself as the point of intervention. Instead of asking what is driving a population into decline, it asks how that population could be altered to survive or to stop causing harm. For Synthtic Biology, the answer lies in genomes and microbiomes rather than landscapes. Nature is no longer something to give space to recover, but something to be redesigned.
This shift rarely announces itself. It arrives in the language of solutions. The draft decision’s Action Plan maps synthetic biology onto sixteen targets of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework. Benefits are recognised before they are assessed, and the Framework, built to halt and reverse biodiversity loss, becomes a justification for engineering it.
The latest draft no longer refers to “applications for conservation use”, after Parties disagreed over whether to examine them. The decision on a new Ad Hoc Technical Expert Group has been postponed until after a stocktake of the Convention’s work on synthetic biology. Elsewhere, references to synthetic biology have been taken out of the draft decision on invasive alien species.
Yet removing the words does not remove the framing. The debate was about whether to study conservation applications, not about what it means to treat them as conservation in the first place. Weighing “potential positive and potential negative impacts” assumes that redesigning nature is a legitimate conservation approach, and asks only whether it works. With the AHTEG postponed, there is now even less space to ask that question.
The implications are profound. When the aims of conservation are set by those who design the intervention, decisions about what nature should become move away from ecosystems and the communi-ties that live with them, and towards laboratories and those who fund them. Organisms released into the wild cannot be recalled, so mistakes may not be correctable. The questions this raises concern uncertainty, irreversibility, cumulative effects, ethics and governance.
The precautionary approach, central to the Convention, exists for exactly this situation, yet even the words “the precautionary approach” were in bracketed. The language on assessment in the thematic action plan has also been weakened, even as horizon scanning and monitoring are mentioned. Anticipating new developments means little without the capacity to assess them. Some changes to the living world cannot be undone.
Synthetic biology’s place in conservation should be an open question and debated openly, not a starting assumption written into procedure. What Parties decide in Yerevan will help determine whether conservation continues to work with the living world’s capacity to renew itself, or sets out to redesign it.