A question I asked myself recently was "How much, and to whom, do I have to donate in order to offset the measurable negative impacts of my lifestyle?"

This was a surprisingly difficult question to answer, so I decided to do some research and make a website to make it easier for other people to answer the same question. 

https://leavenoharm.org

I'm a firmware engineer by training and profession, NOT a professional writer, cause evaluator, or philosopher, so I'll try to let my website do most of the talking–but I'll try to answer some questions here, and would love to talk about this idea in the comments if you find the website engaging. 

What's the basic idea of leavenoharm.org?

The goal of leavenoharm.org is to make donating easier, specifically to impact areas where a persons lifestyle has a net impact. This means clear recommendations to

1. Animal Welfare through FarmKind.
2. Climate Impact through Giving Green.
3. Habitat Destruction through Rainforest Trust.
4. Plastic Waste through Plastic Bank.

My thesis here is that many people want to do more good to "make up" for the negative impacts that they know their lifestyle causes, like non-human animal harm because of their diet or climate impact because of air travel. The two obvious ways to reduce the overall amount of negative impact (or increase the overall amount of positive impact) are:

1. Lifestyle change to reduce direct impact (e.g. going vegan).
2. Donate to offset the negative impact (where leavenoharm.org comes in). 

My goal here is to make doing 2 as trivial as possible, where the only bottleneck is someone's ability/desire to fund the offsetting. Right now much of the bottleneck is knowing where and how much to donate. 

That means I have a very opinionated set of target funds and ignore many traditional EA cause areas like global health and AI safety. I only recommend cause areas that have impact from an increase in the number of people living in surplus, and I only recommend one target fund in each cause area to make donating as easy as possible. 

Why should I use leavenoharm.org

1. I have a calculator that lets you put in information about your lifestyle and see how much you need to donate to each cause area in order to offset your impact.
2. I have a dashboard that lets you track how your donations are trending. This lets you track your impact and know at what point you will have 'left no harm' by donating enough to offset all of your projected lifetime harm. 

My friends who I have shown this to say the calculator is fun to use, give it a try!

Is moral offsetting good? What about...?

There has been discussion on the EA forums around the validity of moral offsetting. My general thoughts around this are:

It might be the case that becoming vegan + donating to effective charities is more effective than just donating to effective charities, but I have a very difficult time believing that donating to effective charities is bad.  I have an extremely difficult time imagining that leavenoharm.org would increase the overall amount of suffering in the world. 

My positive argument here is that I think pushing for more moral offsetting will cause more positive lifestyle changes than the world where we don't push for any more moral offsetting. This idea looks something like "inertia" in doing good, where people who start doing more good will enjoy the feeling and will try to find ways to do more good (like donating more or enacting positive behavior change) rather than making negative behavior change. I don't have data or sources to back up this hypothesis, but I also haven't seen any data that shows that people who participate in moral offsetting increase the amount of negative behavior they do after offsetting. 

Are you sure your math is sound? 

I did my best. I used ChatGPT (around GPT 5.1 I think) and Gemini 3 Pro (Deep Research) for all of my research and the vast majority of text on the website. All of my findings and math are on the website in one page or another. 

If you think my math or research is wrong in any way please let me know! I'd love to make everything as accurate as possible, with the knowledge that there will be some tradeoff between:

1. The uncertainty in how much good the next marginal dollar will cause to any given charity can best be modeled as a range of possible outcomes with high uncertainty. For example, how confident can I be that the marginal ton of CO₂e is offset with $10? From what I can find it seems to be somewhere in the possible range of $1-20.
2. I want the website to give confident, simple numbers so people don't have to think about the uncertainty ranges. I want them to be given a simple number with no uncertainty, and explain the uncertainty further into the site if they dig further. 

What are your future plans for this? 

1. Set up an organization that can take funding so people can donate directly to leavenoharm.org rather than the individual charities. I want people to put in information about themselves, decide how much they want to donate to each charity, set up a single monthly donation, and go about their lives. The less friction here the better.
2. More automation. Set up systems to pull in new cause areas, add new questions to the calculator, and recalculate the updated impact of the marginal dollar. These numbers will change over time and I would like the site to always be updated with the latest information.
3. Make the site more sharable and social. Something that you can share to socials that says "I care about doing good and I donate enough to offset the negative impacts of my lifestyle"
4. Get the calculator working for non-americans.
5. Point people to more causes. After they donate, I expect people to ask "What now? Where should I donate?" One answer might be more donations to the recommended causes, but another answer might be guiding them to more EA information and other effective charities.