Enviro News Asia, Jakarta — I Gede Wenten, Special Staff to the Minister of Higher Education, Science, and Technology for Research and Development and member of the Steering Committee of National Research and Innovation Agency (BRIN), emphasized that the discovery of new plant species in Indonesia should not merely be viewed as a scientific achievement, but also as an important foundation for building a knowledge-based national bioeconomy.
He delivered the remarks during the BRIN Goes to Stakeholders and Society: Exposing New Species – Flora event at the BJ Habibie Building Auditorium in Jakarta on May 25, 2026.
According to I Gede Wenten, Indonesia’s extraordinary biodiversity must be accompanied by mastery of science and technology in order to create national added value.
“A nation that only possesses biodiversity will remain merely the owner of resources, but a nation that masters knowledge about its biodiversity will become the owner of the future,” he stated.
He explained that the discovery of new flora species is important not only for enriching taxonomic data and supporting conservation efforts, but also for strengthening intellectual property rights (IPR) protection, preventing biopiracy, and developing a knowledge-based bioeconomy.
According to him, biodiversity can only be transformed into a high-value bioeconomy through scientific processes that include identification, characterization, validation, intellectual property protection, technological engineering, standardization, governance, and sustainable utilization.
I Gede Wenten added that long-term research stages are required, starting from plant selection and authentication, extraction, isolation, characterization, and biological testing, to molecular modeling and synthesis that may eventually lead to patentable inventions.
He also highlighted the strategic role of herbarium specimens as scientific evidence of the origin, identity, and characteristics of Indonesian flora.
“In addition to supporting biodiversity conservation and documentation, herbarium collections also serve as important references for intellectual property protection and national bioeconomy development,” he said.
In the context of biodiversity governance, he stressed the importance of implementing access and benefit-sharing mechanisms in the utilization of genetic resources and biodiversity data.
According to him, biodiversity utilization must be carried out through legitimate access permits, protection of genetic resource origins, proper intellectual property management, and fair benefit-sharing for the state, researchers, local governments, and communities that safeguard biodiversity.
He further noted that the digitalization of herbarium specimens has become a crucial foundation for Indonesia’s biodiversity knowledge infrastructure, linking physical collections, scientific metadata, genetic information, intellectual property protection, conservation, and bioeconomy development.
“The transformation of Indonesia’s biodiversity into intellectual wealth and a sovereign bioeconomy begins with the discovery, documentation, conservation, and mastery of knowledge over the archipelago’s tropical flora,” he added.
During the event, National Research and Innovation Agency revealed 29 newly discovered flora species found in Indonesia. Between 1967 and 2025, BRIN researchers together with national and international partners documented 1,583 new species, including 712 flora species. From 2025 until May 2026 alone, 29 new flora species have been scientifically described. (*)
