Cross-posted from the EcoResilience Initiative website.

Our Top Recommended Biodiversity Intervention: Precision Fermentation

Precision Fermentation addresses one of the biggest causes of biodiversity loss - pressure to convert natural land to agriculture and livestock. The industry is in a nascent state, when funding can have a high impact on the course of history. This intervention has the potential to permanently reduce biodiversity loss. This makes it our strongest recommendation.

Why we think it will succeed:

Alt proteins have become more accepted and more widespread in recent years. (see the rising number of flexitarians, market acceptance of impossible burger, and the expected tripling of market growth of alt proteins in 6 years.) The main barriers to adoption are taste, convenience, nutrition, and price. These are diminishing as market research matures, prices fall rapidly, and accessibility increases.

Why this is so impactful for biodiversity:

Habitat loss is by far the number one cause of extinction risk.  Most land conversion is due to livestock and livestock feed. This trend is predicted to worsen as global wealth increases, particularly in biodiverse regions. Precision fermentation dramatically reduces land use: achieving 20% market penetration could halve deforestation, while 80% adoption could halt agricultural land conversion altogether.

How funding will be put to use:

According to Ambitious Impact scale-up-funding is very neglected. Precision fermentation suffers from one-time start up costs (mostly infrastructure) that make it difficult to compete with the established competition.

While you might assume commodity protein production would attract sufficient investment, several factors prevent adequate funding: The eventual market will operate on low profit margins and growth requires specialized research and scaling equipment. Therefore, precision fermentation does not receive adequate attention and funding from investors.^[1]

This is a critical time to fund research, particularly for biodiversity conservation.  If “second generation” precision fermentation processes can swap input feedstock away from tropical high-sugar crops to plentiful agricultural waste, it would not only eliminate feedstock land use but also significantly lower operational costs. Early adoption is important, because production chains will be locked in by existing factories. This will make it increasingly arduous for companies to switch and for ag-waste methods to compete.

Our Runner-Up Recommendation for Biodiversity Intervention: Biobanking

The possibility of solving extinction entirely makes biobanking a crucial path to pursue with long timelines. Traditional conservation has largely overlooked this intervention, despite the rock-bottom price per sample and multiple conservation benefits. Right now there are very few biodiversity biobanks. The main remaining uncertainty is whether adequate gestation technology is possible, but we expect this challenge is most likely surmountable. A potentially disqualifying drawback to this intervention is that it does not contribute directly to habitat conservation. We would like to note that biobanks help prevent extinction through supplementing genetic diversity and allowing the piecemeal rebuilding of ecosystems. Read more on this newly released shallow dive!

Other highly effective biodiversity interventions^[2]

Introducing keystone species includes some very high-impact outcomes, particularly through wetland creation. Keystone species benefit multiple specialized species, are self-perpetuating, and represent a relatively inexpensive intervention for their impact size. Some habitats cannot exist at all without these species. However, a drawback is that implementation varies from location to location, requiring localized approaches that create unavoidable scaling overhead. Before we can recommend specific keystone species introduction programs, we need to conduct additional research.

What Makes our Top Choices Powerful

As we investigated 15 different contender interventions, we looked for interventions that had strong performance across several key criteria:.

• Evolutionary Distinctiveness Impact
• Scaling Well
• Long Lasting/Self Perpetuating Effects
• Simple Implementation
• Addresses Land Use
• Leverages Tipping Points
• Positive Ecosystem Complexity
• Neglected
• High Potential Upside
• Avoids Development Issues
• Addresses Climate Change
• High Funding Need
• Benefits Many Species

Precision fermentation caught our eye because it satisfied many of these criteria at once: It would be self perpetuating if it becomes an affordable desirable food source. It addresses habitat loss, which is one of the biggest causes of extinction (and it is expected to continue to worsen, particularly in biodiverse tropical countries). Precision fermentation changes incentives and reduces pressure to convert land to agriculture globally. It's underfunded. It could have a massive total impact if it scaled up to be a significant proportion of our diet. After we investigated further, it held up as a plausible funding target: even with sugar cane feedstock and the first 20% of market penetration, it would cause positive land use change for biodiverse regions.

Biobanking has similar characteristics. It is not self-perpetuating, but it could address the threat of extinction in a scalable, cost effective way for the most evolutionarily distinct threatened species. It remains underfunded by conservation organizations despite its potential for global impact if strongly supported.

Keystone species possess many desirable intervention characteristics.Though less scalable than our other top recommendations, they are self-perpetuating, leverage ecological tipping points, and substantially improve ecosystems. Scaling may be possible to improve, if generalist keystone species could have positive impacts in a variety of locations. Introducing keystone species may be neglected due to the popular resistance against taking an active role in conservation.

Other interventions required ongoing funding, did not scale well, or weren’t as neglected. For a combination of reasons, the other interventions we reviewed did not emerge as top contenders for this first year of our biodiversity intervention assessment. We would like to highlight some of the other interventions which performed well in this comparison, and we hope to share more details on our comparisons eventually.

Expected Value Analysis

Most academic papers estimating cost seem unrealistically high.^[3] We found examples ranging from $5,200,000, $1,300,000, $682,396, $635,000, to $380,000 annually per species. Cost-effectiveness estimates are rare in conservation literature, likely because it is not advantageous to produce such estimates for a number of reasons. Ongoing maintenance is often required, unpredictable variance is common, and it's difficult to accurately estimate reduction in extinction risk. The lack of cost/benefit awareness is a known systematic problem. We were unable to find more  readily available project-based estimates of cost per extinction reduction rate. Manual estimation from available data would help improve these comparisons.

Precision Fermentation

Precision Fermentation is difficult to estimate because it reroutes economic drivers and lowers future deforestation rates. It is unclear which locations or species populations will be impacted by international market forces. At 20% of market share for microbial proteins, 50% of future deforestation would be prevented. That is 78Mha of forests saved every 30 years, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa. We estimate this would save somewhere between 345 - 4810 species after 200 years of deforestation averted in sub-Saharan Africa.  If we spend 3x as much as we have for the last 10 years (~20% of $5.5 billion) in technological development to reach 20% of market capture, then the cost for research would be $3-$15.5 billion, and the per-species saved rate would be between $45,000,000 on the high end and $600,000 on the low end, with a midrange of $2-10 million. This is not including all the non-forested areas prevented from conversion to grazing/agricultural land. Even so, this is 7.6x-130x or about 20x less per species extinction than academic estimates for 200 years of perpetual funding.

The full estimated cost to reach 20% of market share is $100 billion-$200 billion from build out and supporting technology development. Investors have funded alternative proteins to the current multi-billion market size. If the current pace of growth continues (tripling in 6 years), it  will take 18 years to reach 225 billion and the market reach we hope to achieve.^[4]

This estimation involves substantial uncertainty and should be carefully revised before it is used for further comparisons. These academic cost estimates are likely unreasonably high.  Adoption of precision fermentation would “solve” demand for habitat loss more permanently than most traditional conservation actions. The further we project, the better precision fermentation’s relative performance. But conclusions beyond 200 years seem unwise. For example, other land use threats like energy generation may make such agricultural land use savings necessary but insufficient.

Keystone Species

Keystone species were much simpler to estimate. Introducing a keystone species in the Dhansiri River in Aassam, India, costs approximately $2,470,000/species for 200 years of operation. This included floating mats of vegetation for water quality remediation, and mussel propagation for 8 years. For comparison, the actual sewage treatment plant budget for the Dhansiri River is $680,000. This budget includes awareness building, river monitoring, pollution tracking, reforestation, straining, counteraction for violations, etc. for 25 years. This sewage treatment benefits many highly evolutionarily distinct native species. Assuming reconstruction or expansion of the plant every 50 years, the cost would come out to $2,720,000 for 200 years of operation. These two interventions are roughly equivalent in cost and impact. But we caution that there is enormous uncertainty in these estimations.

Biobanking

Biobanking is even more cost effective at 127k per species for 200 years of preservation. It provides essentially unlimited time to wait for resurrection technology to become highly cost effective. Cloning currently costs somewhere between 6k-1,500k suggesting an eventual cost somewhere in the middle. Our rough conclusion is 133k-172k per species. The upper limit is set by Colossal's current price at $188 million per species,^[5] and the concern that artificial wombs might be quite expensive.

Concerns

We acknowledge that especially biobanking may sound quite unnatural. Still, we don’t want to exclude that if it helps us enormously to save species. There are also a lot of uncertainties: the interventions may not work as assumed, but these seem to have a good expected value. There are also a lot of other questions and we hope to write more about them at some point - or discuss in the comments! 

1. ^{^}

   Fortunately the industry has been advancing without relying on aid. We estimate 96% of current investment is non-charitable.

2. ^{^}

   Fertilizer and Pesticides - Earlier I believed these would be contenders for highest impact. Upon closer inspection, I cannot recommend these as the most high impact. Pesticides mostly do not have a long duration in the environment (2 month-10 years). Fertilizers are somewhat less damaging, but for a much longer duration (10-100 years). Both of these soil contaminants cannot easily be remedied. Both are restricted to being near (1km) agricultural land which means their reduction in extinction risk is severely limited. Reducing pesticide and fertilizer use has some win-win situations, but the downside is too massive to ignore. The highest impact regions for biodiversity would be where agriculture is expanding. That is mostly in poor countries. Even slight chances of significant potential crop loss is extremely harmful to the livelihoods of everyone in these areas. Regulations would not be enforced due to severely limited government capacity in these regions. As an intervention the impact duration is low: ongoing vigilance and education will continue to be needed. Still, some simple fixes might do a lot of good - apps that show the windy days or checking for illegal pesticide use, discouraging fertilizer use within 100m of water, etc. 

3. ^{^}

   Perhaps the academic estimates are accurately showing the true price, and all species protection programs are pathetically inadequate. Or they may be overestimating as a form of advocacy for conservation efforts. Budgets may be routinely overestimated because funding is often 30%-1% of requested amounts. Or budgets may be underestimated for true extinction prevention, because they are calibrated against our current spending prioritizations.

^{^}

Not all alt-protein funding is precision fermentation - currently it is 25% of the sector. Another 6 years may achieve the described 20% scenario.

^{^}

This cap comes from Colossal's current funding being $755 million and they are supposed to de-extinct 5 species, so $150,000,000 per species. It’s obviously not a rigorous estimate, but I don’t think it could possibly cost more than that in 200 years time.

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