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This topic seems like it would fall under the Long-Term Future Fund; someone could apply to them for a grant to fund research in this area.
This topic seems like it would fall under the Long-Term Future Fund; someone could apply to them for a grant to fund research in this area.
I'd like to contribute to preserving natural ecosystems and biodiversity. Has there been an investigation into effective ways to do so? If not, is there a process for funding such an investigation?
My perspective is that ecosystems are impossible to regenerate (in reasonable time) once they're gone and they support many generations of life. I understand that climate change is somewhat correlated, but we could fix climate change and still destroy ecosystems, and vice versa. I found one post from 2 years ago asking something similar, but without an actionable answer.
Kind regards,
Carl
I think that biodiversity and ecosystem conservation are tremendously important fields and deserve much more attention from the EA community as a whole, so I am very happy to see someone else being interested in them as well!
(To those wondering why these fields are important: Biodiversity is an important protection against zoonoses and a big cornerstone of general global biosphere and ecosystem service resilience. Various ecosystems provide services directly or indirectly to humans, like pollinators or the Amazon basin which sustains big parts of the water cycle for South America. Biodiversity risks make these systems much less efficient and/or effective or may ultimately lead to ecosystem service failure or collapse. Species are interdependent in complex and sometimes unforeseen ways; chain reactions when certain species' populations become too small or locally extinct can ripple out transitively to damage the entire ecosystem. Long story short: These ecosystems provide services to humans which we cannot live without, such as pollination, oxygen supply, food supply, pollution filtering, and even water supply. Our planet is, literally, one big ecosystem made of many smaller ecosystems and biodiversity ensures their resilience and functioning.)
Alas, it is a very complicated field which is interdisciplinary with many others (like classical conservation, biology, economics, tourism, politics/policy/advocacy and even criminology). Also take into account that while biodiversity and ecosystem conservation are closely related, they are not completely identical. The people working on these topics come from different backgrounds and hence sometimes have very different perspectives and strategies (which is both good and bad). Ecosystems can be under threat through secondary motives (i.e., they fall prey as "collateral damage" to other human activities) while biodiversity threats can happen due to primary motives (for example, poaching targeting important species which, when lost, have significant negative impact on their whole ecosystem).
I will list some angles I know for tackling this set of issues. This is but a very incomplete list because, as I mentioned, it is a very complicated field that touches on many disciplines:
Hope this list helps. There are many more interventions, I only listed the ones that came to my mind right now.
A great book that might give you a glimpse of the complexities in this field is "The Extinction Market" by Vanda Felbab-Brown. She focuses on wildlife crime, but some of the interventions are transferable. The reason why this book is a real treasure, though, is that she does a great job of explaining the advantages and disadvantages of different interventions and how they tie together with other considerations (like economical and political ones).
There is also an "Effective Environmentalism" group on Facebook, you might want to repeat your question there.
Thank you kindly for your thorough answer. I haven't yet decided what intervention to focus on, but it sounds like some form of promoting awareness could have good leverage.