Outside the conference hall of the Moon Palace, a luxury Cancun resort, warm waves lapped white sands, bathed in a pink Mexican sunset. Inside, close to two hundred delegates to the United Nations’ 2016 biodiversity conference huddled around a doorway, desperate to get into a windowless room for the final evening’s negotiating session. In the end, most of the crowd made it into room, to witness twenty or so country delegates hammer out compromise text late into the night. This wasn’t what they had expected from a UN summit. But the issue under discussion – synthetic biology – is an unusual topic.

Synthetic biology is often described as the application of engineering principles to biology. Some see it a fundamentally new approach to biology; others as the next stage of biotechnology; and others as simply an exercise in rebranding. As social scientists researching this field, we’ve seen the confusion of synthetic biologists as to why a treaty about biodiversity is attempting to govern their research.

The reason lies in the broad mandate of the UN’s convention on biological diversity (CBD). One of the largest international environmental agreements, the CBD’s three objectives include conservation of biodiversity; sustainable use of biodiversity; and the fair and equitable sharing of benefits from genetic resources of biodiversity.

In 2010, when Craig Venter’s “creation of synthetic life” was generating headlines around the world, the CBD’s scientific advisory body first engaged with synthetic biology. Since then, the CBD has become the most active international forum on the issue, consistently calling for a precautionary approach and effective risk assessment. Through an on-line forum and a regionally-balanced expert group, it produced an operational definition of synthetic biology and began to consider potential benefits and adverse effects in relation to the CBD’s three objectives.

The latest round of negotiations in Cancun, which ran from 4-17 December 2016, provided the largest stage yet for a rehearsal of the promises and perils of synthetic biology. For the first time, a contingent of researchers and students working in biotechnology and synthetic biology participated as observers. These scientists, alongside delegates from the biotech industry, talked up the prospects of a new industrial revolution, fuelled by engineered microbes to produce fuels, chemicals, medicines, crops, and food ingredients. On the other side of the debate, coalitions of civil society and community groups challenged such optimism, and warned of detrimental impacts on rural livelihoods, and the consequences of engineering nature in the pursuit of profit.

Going into the negotiations, many expected the debate to focus on biosafety, and specifically the development of gene drives. Instead, a row erupted over shifting methods of accessing biodiversity for research and development. Genetic resources from tropical regions have long been a source of new drug and product discovery for the pharmaceutical and biotech industries. One of the CBD’s main achievements has been to establish that these genetic resources were not simply there for the taking, and that countries had sovereign rights to them. Its Nagoya Protocol was designed to give legal effect to this principle, ensuring “fair and equitable” exchange between providers and commercial users of genetic resources.

Many countries are still in the process of enshrining the Nagoya Protocol in domestic law (although the EU did this in 2014), and there are growing concerns that a loophole is developing. The widespread availability of DNA sequencing, combined with the falling costs of DNA synthesis, is changing how genetic resources travel around the world. Increasingly, scientists can download or email genetic information remotely, and engineer it into a cell to express or mimic the property of its “in-situ” kin. With the rise of open-source online genetic databases, many developing countries are concerned about the creation of new routes for unfair commercial exploitation of their biodiversity.

From the start of the Cancun summit, developing countries were clear they wanted action to close this loophole. Highlighting the pace of technological development, negotiators from Brazil, Namibia and Malaysia insisted that using digital sequence information without consent and benefit-sharing arrangements is biopiracy, and should be acknowledged as such. Some wealthier nations argued that the issue had been sprung on negotiators, others that it was premature to resolve it at this stage. They also said that attempts to regulate digital sequence information would demand the impossible, and put science at risk.

No agreement was reached by the end of the meeting, but the issue wasn’t swept under the rug. A new technical expert group was established to lay the groundwork for a decision at the next session in 2018. Another process will explore the need for a global benefit-sharing mechanism as one possible approach to handling digital sequence information.

Without such agreements at an international level, it seems unlikely that the future bioeconomy will be fair, especially when so much hype and hope rides on the use of big biodata. As the Cancun summit demonstrates, scientific communities - and the societies they serve - need institutions like the CBD to debate and decide how advances in science and technology can support more sustainable futures.

Molly Bond is an ESRC-funded PhD researcher at the University of Bristol. Deborah Scott is a research fellow in science, technology and innovation studies at the University of Edinburgh. They both attended this month’s UN biodiversity conference in Cancun, Mexico.