There is an insane amount of money being thrown around by international organizations and agreements. Nobody with any kind of power over these agreements is asking basic EA questions like: "What are the problems we're trying to solve?" "What are the most neglected aspects of those problems?" and "What is the most cost-effective way to address those neglected areas?"
As someone coming from an EA background reading through plans for $200-700 billion in annual funding commitments that focus on unimaginative and ineffective interventions, it makes you want to tear your hair out. So much good could be done with that money.
EA focuses a lot on private philanthropy, earning-to-give (though less so post-SBF), and the usual pots of money. But why don't we have delegations who are knowledgeable in international diplomacy going to COPs and advocating for more investment in lab-grown meat, alternative proteins, or lithium recycling? It seems like there would be insane alpha in such a strategy.
An example: The Global Biodiversity Framework
The Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF) was adopted in 2022 to halt biodiversity loss. It has 23 targets, commitments of $200 billion annually by 2030 and $700 billion by 2050, and near-universal adoption from every UN member except the United States.
Will those commitments materialize? Probably not. The previous Aichi Biodiversity Targets (2010-2020) completely failed according to the UN's own assessment. But here's the thing: even assuming the GBF makes zero progress on its funding goals, the current biodiversity budget is already around $121 billion per year. The biodiversity finance gap is estimated at $598-824 billion annually, but even the status quo is serious money.
What Is That Money Actually Being Spent On?
Essentially, traditional nature conservation: creating protected areas (the "30x30" target of protecting 30% of land and sea by 2030), requiring corporate disclosure of biodiversity impacts, eliminating harmful subsidies, and so on.
Some of these interventions are necessary. Protected areas do prevent species from going extinct. You can't have tigers without tiger habitat. But many of these interventions have very limited evidence of effectiveness. Corporate disclosure requirements, for example, have almost no empirical support showing they actually reduce environmental harm. They're popular because they're seen as politically feasible, not because they work.
The Elephant in the Room Literally Nobody is Talking About: Beef
You know what would be an extremely good use of that money, probably by far the best use if the GBF really cared about was biodiversity?
Investing in cultivated meat technology.
I'm preaching to the choir on the EA Forum, I know. But I think even here the argument for cultivated meat is rarely made from the biodiversity perspective. And it's actually very obvious looking at the numbers. Livestock occupies 77% of global agricultural land. The FAO estimates 90% of worldwide deforestation is driven by livestock and agriculture. In the Brazilian Amazon specifically, 65-70% of deforestation comes from beef production alone.
The current GBF effectively accepts these drivers as inevitable. The economic incentives pushing landowners to clear forest for cattle aren't going away, and corporations confirming "yup, we chopped down some of the Amazon" isn't going to stop anything. Even if you're just a random conservationist at the GBF, and all you care about in this world is whether your pet-interest species of Amazonian tree frog continues to exist past 2100, then you should be howling for more investment in lab-grown beef.
The Absolutely Insane Funding Gap
There is nothing in the GBF about cultivated meat.
In 2024, global investment in cultivated meat was only $139 million, down 40% from the previous year, and the lowest annual total since 2019. The total ever invested in cultivated meat is around $3 billion.
Using just 1% of the current $121 billion yearly biodiversity budget—$1.2 billion—on cultivated meat investment, we could double the total cumulative investment in lab-grown meat in 3 years. The amount of money that goes to solving the beef problem, one of the main threats to biodiversity globally, is a rounding error compared to what the GBF commits to traditional conservation. The Good Food Institute's own analysis says that "private funding alone will be insufficient to fully fund first-of-a-kind cultivated meat facilities." If just a tiny amount of the GBF's funding went to cultivated meat, we could accelerate its timelines dramatically.
The Leverage Point We're Ignoring
The amount of money that governments commit to biodiversity through international frameworks is orders of magnitude larger than what private philanthropists can muster. When there are such obvious arguments for why that money should be going toward genuinely high-impact interventions, and when COPs are such an obvious leverage point to change the direction of that money, it seems clear that EA should be spending more time thinking about how to influence these summits.
The GBF is trying to eliminate $500 billion in harmful agricultural, mining, and fishing subsidies by 2050 and redirect them toward interventions that might help foster biodiversity. If redirecting just 5% of that $500 billion—$25 billion a year—toward R&D could accelerate cultivated beef price parity by even five years, this would likely be among the Framework's most cost-effective interventions by an order of magnitude. And this is just from a biodiversity perspective. It doesn't even take into account all the other co-benefits that EA tends to talk about: animal welfare, climate change, protein availability, pandemic risk reduction, antibiotic resistance, and so on. This money is just for biodiversity, but the pure biodiversity case is overwhelming on its own.
What Would EA Engagement Look Like?
I don't have all the answers here, but some possibilities:
- Research: Actually model the cost-effectiveness of different GBF interventions. What's the expected biodiversity impact per dollar of protected area funding vs. cultivated meat R&D? Has anyone done this rigorously?
- Advocacy: Get people with international policy expertise into the rooms where these decisions get made. The CBD COP meetings happen regularly. Who from the EA community is attending? Who's making the case for technology investment?
- Coalition-building: The cultivated meat industry wants government funding. Biodiversity organizations want to stop deforestation. These interests align. Is anyone explicitly making this connection in policy spaces?
- Targeted giving: If there are organizations working at this intersection—advocating for technology-forward biodiversity policy at the international level—they might be extremely cost-effective to fund.
EA has traditionally focused on charity evaluation, direct interventions, AI safety, and existential risks. In my experience, it does this with an entrepreneurial mindset, thinking of privately wealthy individuals and small, genius start-up teams first, and large bureaucracies second. And I get why. Large bureaucracies suck and, in general, a happy life is spent far away from them.
But the counterfactual impact of shifting even a small percentage of these enormous funding flows toward high-impact interventions could dwarf what we can achieve through traditional philanthropy. The global biodiversity budget is 1,000 times larger than GiveWell's annual directed giving. Even marginal influence over how that money gets spent could be transformative.
These conversations are happening anyway. The diplomats already have a say over where this money goes. The only question is whether EA is going to show up at the table.
I think part of the issue here probably is that EAs mostly don't think biodiversity is good in itself, and instead believe only humans and animals experiencing well-being is good, and that the impact on well-being of promoting biodiversity is complex, uncertain and probably varies a lot with how and where biodiversity is being promoted. Hard to try and direct biodiversity funding if you don't really clearly agree with raising biodiversity as a goal.
That’s not strictly true, a lot of animal orgs are farmer-facing and will speak to a motivation the farmer cares about (yield) while they secretly harbour another one (welfare of animals). I’ve heard that some orgs go to great lengths to hide their true intentions and sometimes even take money from their services just to appear as if they have a non-suspicious motivation.
I am actually curious why a similar approach hasn’t been tried in biodiversity—if it was just EAs yucking biodiversity (which I have seen, same as you), that’d be really disappointing.
Easier to persuade commercial entities of the merits of making more money (by incidentally doing the right thing) than persuade a reviewer of multiple competitive funding bids scoped for habitat preservation to fund a study into lab grown meat. At the end of the day, the proposals written by biodiversity enthusiasts with biodiversity rationales and very specific biodiversity metrics are just going to be more plausible,[1] even if they turn out to be ineffective.
For similar reasons, I don't expect EA animal welfare funds to award funding to an economic think tank proposing to research how to grow the economy, even if the economic think tank insists its true goal is animal welfare and provides a lot of evidence that investment in meat alternatives and enforcement of animal welfare legislation is linked to overall economic growth.
Biobanks and biodiversity charity effectiveness research might stand a chance, obviously
Somewhat surprised to hear that people can successfully pull that off.
I agree that most EAs probably don't think biodiversity is good in and of itself. I'm in the minority that do - I'm not just a hedonistic utilitatian. Also to reassure people
Its OK to be an EA and not just believe the only thing that matters in this universe is how much well-being there is.
I think the OP has a very good point, and with this much money moving around, biodiversity funding might well be an interesting area for some people to look into.
It's plausible to me that biodiversity is valuable, but with AGI on the horizon it seems a lot cheaper in expectation to do more out-there interventions, like influencing AI companies to care about biodiversity (alongside wild animal welfare), recording the DNA of undiscovered rainforest species about to go extinct, and buying the cheapest land possible (middle of Siberia or Australian desert, not productive farmland). Then when the technology is available in a few decades and we're better at constructing stable ecosystems de novo, we can terraform the deserts into highly biodiverse nature preserves. Another advantage of this is that we'll know more about animal welfare-- as it stands now the sign of habitat preservation is pretty unclear.
A couple more "out-there" ideas for ecological interventions:
I totally agree that there are some "out there" interventions that, in a perfect world, we would be funding much more. In particular biobanking (recording the DNA of species about to go extinct) should be considered much more, I totally agree. Unfortunately, the world is full of techno-pessimists, deontologists, post-structuralists, diplomats who don't know what any of the preceding words even mean, etc. This seems insane, but MANY conservationists are against de-extinction for (in my view) fairly straightforward technophobic reasons. Convincing THOSE people, who ALREADY have LOTs of money, that actually they should invest that money in changing the opinions of Sam Altman, will just simply never work. I DO think, however, you could get them to invest in lab grown meat. So while I agree with you in the abstract about some of that, I think that if we're being pragmatic (our duty as EAs), then lab-grown meat is probably the best bet in terms of plausible arguments.
Also, just purely philosophically, I think that putting a lot of stock in the sign of habitat preservation can lead to some strange places. What if we decide that the Amazon rainforest has a negative WAW sign? Would you be in favor of completely replacing it with a parking lot, if doing so could be done without undue suffering of the animals that already exist there? Maybe you are, which would be consistent, but that's an extremely unintuitive ethical claim that I have yet to read anyone defend seriously or persuasively. Would be very interested in someone trying though!
My op-ed on why de-extinction of mammoths, at least, is a bad idea: https://arstechnica.com/science/2025/04/editorial-mammoth-de-extinction-is-bad-conservation/
Definitely not completely replacing because biodiversity has diminishing returns to land. If we pave the whole Amazon we'll probably extinct entire families (not to mention we probably cause ecological crises elsewhere and disrupt ecosystem services etc), whereas on the margin we'll only extinct species endemic to the deforested regions.
If the research on WAW comes out super negative I could imagine it being OK to replace half the Amazon with higher-welfare ecosystems now, and work on replacing the rest when some crazy AI tech allows all changes to be fully reversible. But the moral parliament would probably still not be happy about this. Eg killing is probably bad, and there is no feasible way to destroy half the Amazon in the near term without killing most of the animals in it.
I don't think this is sufficient to explain EA disinterest, because there are also neartermist EAs who are skeptical about near-term AGI, or just don't incorporate it into their assessment of cause areas and interventions.
I agree with some of the comments below -- I think most EAs support things like lab-grown meat for animal welfare reasons. If there's a strong argument (which I think there is) for lab-grown meat ALSO being the best possible thing you could do for biodiversity, and making that argument to the right people could literally 10x the amount of money going to lab-grown meat R&D per year, then I think we should making that argument. If you're consequentialist about it, the motives of the GBF are irrelevant. What matters is that they could massively fund lab-grown meat, and nobody is argueing to them that it's their interest to do so.
And about huw's point below (ie. many lobbyists make arguments that don't align with their true motivations), I think that's how lobbying usually works. It's pretty easy to imagine EAs going to a COP and making the 100% true and good faith argument that lab-grown meat would be more effective for protecting biodiversity than, say, "protecting" on paper a random, 150-square km patch of water in the South Pacific. Those EAs might not care about biodiversity themselves, but if they succeeded in getting 0.1% of the budget dedicated to lab grown meat R&D, and thus DOUBLING annual investment in the sector, that would also be awesome for animal welfare.
Agreed, David.
Nitpick. I would say humans, animals, microorganisms, and digital beings.
Hi David, I agree that this is a huge opportunity. That's why we at Giving Green are building a nascent biodiversity charity evaluator, funded by an anonymous donor in the space. We plan to publicly release our initial strategy report along with "Top Charities" in late February. If any potential biodiversity donors would like to see the reports before then, we can share privately. So stay tuned!
Hey Dan, that sounds really exciting! Looking forward to seeing how you've supported your evaluations empirically! I feel like that essentially never happens in conservation. That's gonna be awesome! I'll stay tuned!
EcoResilience Inititative is working on applying EA principles (ITN analysis, cost-effectiveness, longtermist orientation, etc) to ecological conservation. But right now it's just my wife Tandena and a couple of her friends doing research on a part-time volunteer basis, no funding or anything, lol.
Here are two recent posts of theirs describing their enthusiasm for precision fermentation technologies (already a darling of the animal-welfare wing of EA) due to its potentially transformative impact on land use if lots of people ever switch from eating meat towards eating more precision-fermentation protein. And here are some quick takes of theirs on deep ocean mining (investigating the ecological benefits of mining the seabed and thereby alleviating current economic pressures to mine in rainforest areas) and biobanking (as a cheap way of potentially enabling future de-extinction efforts, once de-extinction technology is further advanced).
There are also some bigger, more established EA groups that focus mostly on climate interventions (Giving Green, Founder's Pledge, etc); most of these have at least done some preliminary explorations into biodiversity, although there is not really much published work yet. Hannah Ritchie at OurWorldInData has compiled some interesting information about various ecological problems, and her book "Not The End of the World" is great -- maybe the best starting place for someone who wants to get involved to learn more?
Hey jackson, these are awesome links, thanks for sharing! Def hoping to see growth in biodiversity side of EA. Hopefully you guys are the beginning of that! And I will def check out these links!
Hello David et al.,
I'm a conservation scientist and ecologist with an interest in making conservation more about the quality of animal (including all human, not just elites) life.
I broadly agree with your theory of change: ruminants (and actually animal-sourced foods broadly) provide an area of shared interests between the conservation and effective altruism communities. My organization (Conservation X Labs, or CXL) is trying to do work very much along the lines of what you’ve described. We are partnering with several conservation NGOs and the Good Food Institute (whose new CEO, Nigel Sizer, is a biodiversity guy) to elevate alternative proteins as a biodiversity tool. CXL’s specialty is open innovation, prizes and challenges for conservation. We’ve just been awarded a grant to develop criteria for The Perfect Protein Prize, which—if funded—could incentivize innovators across relevant sectors to develop protein ingredients that can help achieve taste and cost parity. It would also involve a major media campaign placing alternative proteins at the heart of conservation. And we’re starting a brand new (and currently unfunded) effort to get a major institution that moves lots of resources for sustainable development to see the alternative proteins industry as an actionable investment. If any of this interests you or others on this forum, I’m happy to chat! nitin@conservationxlabs.org.
That said, I do think moving a big chunk of the $121B going into conservation at present (as proposed in the post) involves complexities that aren’t immediately apparent. (Disclaimer: I haven’t dug deep into where that stat comes from: the following is based mostly on my experience, ~20 years in the conservation world). First, conservation institutions are already aware of alternative proteins. WWF has a report on plant-based meats, and the IUCN included cultivated meat/fermentation as a potential biodiversity-benefiting technology in their documents on synthetic biology. The lack of support so far is about politics and culture, not lack of awareness. There is also generally quite a bit of inertia in conservation, in part because it’s a pretty decentralized field built on diverse objectives. My understanding is that a lot of the $121B going to conservation is actually government budgets going to support national parks and related wildlife management work; these protected areas were established through decades of lobbying of various governments that don’t adhere to a central mandate, and PAs are now popular with middle class citizens and the tourism industry worldwide. I assume getting broad support for alternative proteins would similarly require more than a few EAs at a few conservation conferences—it will require a lot of folks in lots of capitol buildings over a long period. Finally, I (and CXL) believe conservationists are not really trained to think about technology and major transformations as a force for good. Conservationists are trained to value that which is “natural” (minimal/selective human interference), and we spend a lot of our time around local/indigenous peoples whose traditional, historically sustainable ways of life are under siege by modernity. It makes sense to be skeptical that food being produced in a sterile factory in some big city is going to make life better for the people and animals that have historically been left behind by centralized development models.
So—I think there should absolutely be an alliance between EAs and conservationists on animal-sourced foods and alternative proteins. But I think the conservation sector may not embrace APs as quickly as we would like, for what I think are both good and bad reasons.
Hello Nitin,
Thank you for your long and thoughtful reply! I have just looked through your website and the website of Conversation X Labs. What you are doing seems extremely cool! Amazing that you guys seem to have a report, award, or grant available for practically every major driver of biodiversity loss and climate change. Textiles, alternative proteins, fire, artisanal mining. I'll definitely be emailing you to learn more. I'm super happy that CXL exists.
About your responses:
1) I totally agree that conservationists are aware of the importance of alternative proteins in the abstract, but I don't think they think about it very often in practice. I am currently getting a masters in biodiversity conservation at Oxford, and though I spend lots of time in both the Biology and the Geography / Environment departments talking and learning about conservation, I am the only one who will ever bring up alternative proteins. I would describe the range of opinions at Oxford as falling between 1) developing alt proteins is important but that's not our job, to 2) new technology likely to be controlled by billionaires and thus not to be trusted. I am partially empathetic to both of these positions, but ultimately I think they limit many conservationists imaginations about how to best combat the biodiversity crisis.
2) It is true that much of the $121B described in the KMGBF is already earmarked for particular projects, many of them parks popular with the middle class, international ecotourists, etc. But not all of it. Much of that money could be spent in a variety of ways. It is true that there are political, cultural, and logistical barriers to that money being funneled towards alt proteins. But that is true of all policy, especially all international policy. If influencing policy money were essay, lobbyists wouldn't exist. That's why we need some lobbyists in our corner.
3) You say "I (and CXL) believe conservationists are not really trained to think about technology and major transformations as a force for good." I simply could not agree with this more. I think there are multiple reasons for this, many of which go beyond the scope of this reply to a reply of an EA Forum post. However, one that I think doesn't get mentioned enough, (and is very relevant for the EA Forum) is this: most conservationists chose to become conservationists because they love being in the field and working with animals. IF it is true that, per unit effort, the most impact you can have on the biodiversity crisis is developing solar energy to fight climate change, or developing alternative proteins to undermine demand for beef ranching in the Amazon, etc., then that has very uncomfortable implications for people who want to save animals by actually BEING AROUND them. If you love the Amazon rainforest and want to save it, feels bad to be told that perhaps the best thing you could do would be to move to London and fundraise for cultivated beef.
I'm not suggesting that all field biologists become cultivated meat fundraisers. I am a field biologist myself, and am happiest in the field. I believe it is important work. I'm just saying some EA-coded arguments in favor of developing alt proteins can threaten some conservationists' visions of what it means to sacrifice to protect the rainforest.
Hello David, I think we're on the same page! I especially agree about the reluctance to give up field work (which is gratifying day-to-day) for bureaucratic/policy/maybe-this-will-change-the-world-in-fifteen-years work. I suffered from that reluctance for some time. Really hard to give up working with elephants.
as far as I can tell the answer to this type of question is always that someone did a napkin calculation 10 years ago and decided that either (a) lots of funding within an arbitrarily-defined "cause area" means everything within that cause isn't neglected, or (b) affecting a large pool of funding isn't tractable enough and therefore not worth spending EA resources on, and then because of path dependency in the development of EA as a community of practice it's now just hard to gain traction or interest in cause areas outside of the EA canon
There could totally be truth to both of these points. I would add a third that the EA community is insular, and attracts a particular kind of person that tends to be frustrated / turned off by things like bureaucracy and process. I suspect there's a cultural bias (which I share! to be clear) against ideas like going as a diplomat to huge frustrating conventions every year full of irrational people parroting doublespeak, even if those conventions represent opportunity to do good. Much more appealing to go work in an AI lab, make a bunch of money, and have friends who also grew up reading LessWrong.
Thank you for this interesting post on EA engagement with biodiversity funding.
However, I'm somewhat skeptical about the emphasis on cultivated meat as a default solution for biodiversity concerns. While I recognize its potential environmental benefits compared to conventional meat, there are several reasons to question whether it should be prioritized as heavily as suggested.
I've explored some of these concerns in a previous post, which I'd encourage you to consult. Briefly, the main arguments include:
The cannibalization problem: Available consumer data (Slade 2018; Bryant & Sanctorum 2021) suggests substantial overlap between consumers interested in cultivated and plant-based alternatives. This raises concerns that cultivated meat may primarily displace plant-based options, which often perform better environmentally, rather than conventional meat.
Timeline and plant-based trajectory: By the time cultivated meat achieves commercial viability, plant-based alternatives will have continued improving. Products like Beyond and Impossible burgers are already approaching taste parity in certain contexts, and the quality improvement trajectory over the past decade has been remarkable.
Cost considerations: Even optimistic techno-economic analyses project production costs around $20/kg or higher in the near term, while plant-based alternatives continue approaching price parity with conventional meat.
Strategic resource allocation: The substantial attention and funding directed toward cultivated meat creates potential opportunity costs within the alternative protein space, where resources and political capital are finite.
I'm not arguing against all cultivated meat research (maintaining diverse technological options has value). However, I believe the current enthusiasm within EA, as reflected in your post, may be disproportionate to the available evidence.
Hey David, if you're not already familiar with them, you might be interested in the work of Dansk Vegetarisk Forening, an ACE Recommended Charity (that last link goes to the ACE report of their work). They influenced the equivalent of $65 million (USD) in Danish government funding toward plant-based foods. They stewarded a partnership between the Danish Government and the E.U. Presidency for the Plant Food Summit. And they launched the Danish Plant-Based Diplomacy initiative, supported by several farmers’ associations and other mainstream stakeholders (including pig farmers!). They were at COP in Brazil this year, hosting 10 different panels. Here's a short post on what they aimed to do there.
SVB, another ACE Recommended Charity, was also at COP, as were various other effective animal advocacy orgs trying to address some of the issues you raise here.
I think the COP in Brazil was the climate COP of the climate agreement, not the CBD COP.
ProVeg International advocates on UN conferences and I think they prioritize which conferences are most useful. If they get enough donations, they will certainly attend every CBD COP. ;)
While EA is not fully at the table yet, EcoResilience Initiative is an EA group trying to answer exactly those questions:
So far we're 1) maintaining a big list of biodiversity interventions (not just protecting land!), 2) investigating which of these are the most effective types of interventions, 3) identifying ways people can donate to projects working on those highly effective interventions, 4) developing conservation philosophy (ex: prioritizing coverage of the entire evolutionary tree and the long-term value of biodiversity (coming in a couple weeks)).
EcoResilience Initiative keeps getting requests from EA members that the EA movement provide some guidance on how to improve environmental strategies! So its more getting organized and working towards the goal than a total lack of desire from EA.
We (ERI) are a very small team, but we are looking to grow. We hope our work will provide the first steps towards influencing program managers, NGOs and the funding you talk about in this post.
As was posted in some other comments: there is also the new biodiversity recommendation from Giving Green coming in February, Effective Environmentalism's community building work, and Conservation X Labs as an example of tactical conservation impact. Outside of EA there is Conservation Evidence, which is making research on effectiveness digestible. EDGE which is prioritizing global conservation with better a methodology. The Earth Biogenome Project is coordinating the genetic sequencing of all life on earth. And many others working on improving conservation with their specific approach, on in their specific corner of the world.
I’d also be curious about whether Abundance money could fund this, too. Urban sprawl is a big driver of habitat destruction!
Is it really?
Thanks for writing this up! Despite the title I found it very informative and interesting.
I didn't realize it was that much money. This has relevance to the debates about whether AI will value humans. Though EA has not focused as much on making mainstream money more effective, there have been some efforts.
But my major response is why the focus on cultivated meat? It seems like efforts on plant-based meat or fermentation or leaf protein concentrate have much greater likelihood of achieving parity in the near term.
It could even be that mitigating existential risk is the most cost-effective way of saving species, though I realize that is probably too far afield for this pot of money.
Fermentation or leaf protein concentrate are other excellent ideas. The main reason I think lab-grown beef is the thing to focus in is simply because beef is the main issue. The elephant in the biodiversity room is primarily cattle-ranching. Any successful intervention, purely from a biodiversity perspective (the perspective of this pot of money) would have to address beef. I understand there are probably multiple avenues towards that goal, however, and would be very open to being persuaded that other methods could achieve it.
Executive summary: The author argues that Effective Altruism is largely absent from international biodiversity funding decisions despite $121 billion per year already being allocated, and that redirecting even a small fraction of this money toward cultivated meat R&D would likely be far more cost-effective for biodiversity than many current conservation interventions.
Key points:
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