A range of sectors use genetic resources and associated traditional knowledge, including the pharmaceutical, agriculture, industrial biotechnology, cosmetics, botanicals, and food and beverage. Over the past two decades, scientific and technological developments evolving markets, and different business and intellectual property models have transformed demand for access to genetic resources and associated traditional knowledge in these sectors. As a result, the Nagoya Protocol will be implemented in a very different environment from that encountered by negotiators of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) in 1992. The timing of the Nagoya Protocol to adapt to these new realities, and to incorporate lessons learned from the last 20 years of access and benefit-sharing (ABS) policy implementation, could not be better.