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!
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.
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/
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.