While EA is not fully at the table yet, EcoResilience Initiative is an EA group trying to answer exactly those questions: 

"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?"

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.

Hi, I really appreciate your independent thinking. I strongly suspect that the main reason people are not choosing to have more kids is because of the raising kids portion, not the pregnancy portion. At least that's my reason for not having more kids.  If this (the difficulty of raising kids, rather than birthing them) is the main bottleneck for most families, then I suspect the best ways to boost fertility would be mostly policy things along the lines of:

• Less strict zoning laws --> more abundant, cheaper housing so young couples can more easily afford to live in larger houses, sooner.
• Reducing the large amount of redistribution we currently do towards seniors (they are some of the richest demographics in world history!) and directing more towards young people -- better yet targeted towards encouraging children (childcare subsidies, more and better schools, direct "baby bonus" payments, weird income incentives like they do in Hungary, etc)
• Especially for places like Korea, trying reduce spending more and more on individual children (eg by hiring private tutors, making kids study 24/7 as part of a stressful, intense competition to get into the best schools)
• Random little ways of making life more amenable for families with children, eg less-strict car seat laws, passing free-range-child laws to reduce false-positive CPS investigations and other sources of hostility towards child-rearing, etc.
• For more on these kinds of things, Zvi Moshowitz's has a good series of posts on fertility-related policy issues

I think it's also possible that the very best lever for increasing fertility would be to boost marriages rather than the birth rate among married couples, since there is some good evidence toward this conclusion.

On artificial wombs as a technology: I do not have any information unfortunately (other than anecdotes). I would also suggest checking outside academia if you have not done so yet. And if anyone is doing this "for pets" as a way to make progress faster before transitioning to people. 

Out of personal interest, though, I am highly interested in knowing what the main bottlenecks and timelines are for artificial wombs. This is because it would contribute towards reversing species extinction, and I would inform my estimates to how far away that technology is. Please share what you learn, I would appreciate it!

In general if you are seeing an obvious lack of rigor everywhere you look, then you can greatly improve the information environment by doing your own shallow research and sharing what you find. I think this itself would be a great service. (even without doing a full delphi forecast)

Hi, thank you for voicing this concern. I read your recent post, “Rewilding Is Extremely Bad.”

Personally, I doubt that most wild animals have negative lives. (informed by analogy to most of our own history of subsistence-level survival, and my doubt that they would consider their lives to have not been worth living). I also don’t believe that total hedonic utilitarianism is a complete frame for thinking about this. I think it is important to factor in people's and animals' preferences for continued existence. Mostly I think we just don't know much about this question overall. I do think we should care about this fundamental question and certainly do what is in our power to improve the lives of other beings.

I think you may have gotten the wrong impression from my use of "biodiversity." It would be understandable to assume that I want to maximize Earth's total biomass / total natural land area / number of wild animals, or something like that. I'm actually mostly interested in preserving the diversity of life that has evolved on Earth, such as by avoiding species extinctions. I think there are several good reasons to do this, such as to provide the far future with valuable information that would otherwise be lost, potentially fulfill uplift-style moral obligations we may have towards nonhuman animals, and generally keep our options open.

Preserving natural land tends to be a tractable, robust, large scale way to prevent species extinctions. But there are other biodiversity interventions that work with very small numbers of individuals, like seed banks or analogous "insect zoo", or even zero individuals, like biobanking tissue samples with the aim of de-extinction in a utopian future world. 

Perhaps we could both celebrate something like a well-designed insect zoo - where we care for many small populations of insects, work toward better understanding their many different desires, elevate the value of their lives for more to see, and preserve a wide variety of life forms into the future. There are probably also a variety of biodiversity-enhancing measures that would simultaneously boost animal welfare. Unfortunately which interventions are good depend a lot on figuring out the proper value of complex vs simple animals and how far into positive or net-negative territory different animals are. I hope to write up a list of these types of mutually beneficial interventions.

${}^{Giving}$ and I refuse to elaborate further

This was well written and informative. I'm interested in improving government performance to allow coordination and combat the problems that come with corruption, so thank you for linking away to those solutions as well. 

Besides being a local node, I think the incidental translation of EA concepts to Estonian is potentially quite valuable. 

Thank you for writing this post - I like to keep a mental list of ways conservation and wild animal welfare can work together. Somehow I forgot this fit the criteria. 

This is interesting to me as well. It seems like more of a philosophical question to me, but I have not given it though consideration to say. If you don't mind sharing, how would empirical anchors inform this?

I found the linked Case for Insect Consciousness really compelling. This is the sort of mindset I want conducting this kind of research. Reading the honest skepticism combined with careful self examination greatly boosted my respect for the project. I'm keen to learn more.

We're working on it! A quick synopsis of the more fleshed-out argument I'm hoping to post soon on the foundational philosophy: It seems oddly universal that people to care about nature. For another it seems like the sort of scarce resource (like historical artifacts) that future humans will value. I think we will place great value on it after we reach takeoff, post-scarcity, etc. Furthermore I think that a variety of experiences existing is better than a world full of similar experiences.

A portion of the philosophical basis you are looking for was recently posted  on the EA forum (it was one of the winners of the Essays on Longtermism competition!). The essay illustrates the value of "now-or-never" preservation and explores to what degree information is valuable to future generations. The essay suggests that preservation of species themselves is valuable but not practical compared to documentation. I think there are practical actions we can take to preserve species, but our second recommended intervention was biobanking for the reasoning given in the essay. The essay also touches on the concern of arbitrariness. 

For context, we've never said that extinction is an x-risk or otherwise a top-priority cause area. But I'm a believer in big-tent EA. In my view lots of things like improving housing policy or etc are good, even if not maximally good compared to the most-important cause. I certainly don't want to take people off of x-risk work, but I think this still falls under the Effective Altruism umbrella. 

There's lots of environmental conservation money being spent. People value something they  label "nature", and it seems good for people to get more of what they want without being confused, counterproductive, economically destructive, etc, as so much of the environmental movement is. I also think its important to work on clarifying what exactly they/we are valuing. I hope to contribute on that front as well. 

So, yes, very important, and we're working on it!