Cross-posted from my substack.
Today, I’m launching the Wildlife Technology Fund at Renaissance Philanthropy.
The purpose of the fund is to scope, design, and manage coordinated research programs (CRPs), focused on making wild animal welfare interventions a reality. To do this, we’re prioritizing work that benefits both people and animals, often by working to solve some kind of wildlife conflict. While I believe we should work to solve all kinds of wild animal welfare issues, things that significantly benefit people and resolve conflicts will be more tractable to implement sooner.
We’re currently hiring for program managers to scope and manage CRPs. If you’re looking for varied work and high autonomy, this might be for you. Please share widely!
I can’t thank Wild Animal Initiative enough for doing the foundational work that makes this Fund possible. WAI is where these ideas were borne and refined, and the team there is responsible for the fundamental insights that make identifying positive interventions possible.
Over the next few months, I’ll share explanations of some of the program areas we’re exploring, and why they stand to help (at least) millions of people and billions of wild animals. For now, some Q&A.
What is a coordinated research program?
CRPs are inspired by practices originally advanced at the US government agency DARPA (and described very thoroughly here). These programs are widely recognized as one of the best models for interdisciplinary, goal-oriented science. They are characterized by:
- Top-down problem selection by expert program managers (PMs) who commit to fixed-term programs (typically 3–5 years).
- Active management and milestone-driven accountability, rather than hands-off grant-giving.
- Deliberate coordination among performers — building communities of researchers around novel problems and reducing the "weirdness barrier" that comes with working in a neglected area.
- Easily-terminable contracts, which let PMs pivot funding away from approaches that aren't working and toward those that are.
Despite the popularity of the ARPA model in defense, biomedicine, energy, and climate, it has never previously been applied to animal welfare. The Wildlife Technology Fund exists to fill that gap.
Our CRPs will focus on two complementary pathways:
- Translation — taking candidate interventions from initial theory to field-readiness. The science largely exists; no one has integrated the pieces into a deployable intervention.
- Bottleneck removal — building the tools, metrics, and infrastructure that block many interventions at once. We cannot improve what we cannot measure, and we cannot target what we cannot monitor. Resolving an infrastructure bottleneck can unlock many downstream interventions.
How will the Fund work?
While details vary by focus area, most programs will follow a similar arc:
- Scoping: A PM is assigned or proposes a direction, then runs a discovery process (research, interviews) and pitches a full program design — budget, translation plan, partners, and a clear case for why this topic warrants the CRP approach. It’s at this stage the program concepts get vetted to ensure they have a clear application planned for the end of their lifecycle, and that the math checks out on cost-effectiveness.
- Development: Once approved, the PM identifies grantees through workshops, RFIs, and direct outreach. They also secure implementation partners: people or organizations that will carry forward the results of the program into the world. Small de-risking projects (e.g., tests of critical assumptions) can begin here.
- Launch: The main body of work begins, often with multiple teams in parallel, coordinated tracks. The PM travels extensively, keeps teams on track, and builds community (e.g. a dedicated Slack workspace for cross-pollination).
- Refinement: Teams that aren't progressing or have hit intractable roadblocks are cut. The PM concentrates additional investment in the most promising directions. After this phase, we assess whether the program's original goals were met, and decide what (if anything) is needed to push prototypes into a deployable form.
A tech council of volunteer scientific and ethical experts advises the director on which programs to pursue. Crucially, only the director has final approval authority — this preserves coherent direction and avoids design-by-committee failure modes.
What kinds of things will you focus on?
We have six CRP concepts ready to develop, and we aim to launch 2–3 of them in Year 1. (These will evolve as PMs do their discovery work; all are contingent on funding.)
- Rodent fertility control. Develop agents that achieve high fertility reduction, substantial reductions in suffering versus rodenticides, comparable ecological effects, and high palatability. This program is being carried forward from Wild Animal Initiative’s existing work with Conservation X Labs on the topic.
- Wild insect population monitoring. Build technology that can reliably estimate insect population sizes in the wild. Without this, we cannot evaluate the ecological or welfare consequences of almost any insect-relevant intervention.
- Drone replacements for pollination services. Bring down the cost of micro-drones that can pollinate almond trees down to be cost-competitive with bee-based pollination services, potentially ending an industry that harms billions of bees each year.
- Wildlife vaccination for high-suffering diseases. Identify diseases responsible for the largest welfare burdens and accelerate the development and deployment of vaccines that target them.
- Bird-window collision ecological impacts. Complete the welfare and ecological analysis that bird-safe glass policy currently lacks, including off-target effects on insects and other prey species.
- Welfare indicator discovery. Identify physiological or behavioral indicators that reliably correlate with affective state across many species and integrate over longer time scales, validated through standard processes.
- Vulture conservation. Understanding the disease mitigation effects of larger vulture populations, for both people and animals, and determining if there are cost-effective ways to help conserve relevant species.
Alongside the CRPs, we plan to work to train new program managers. ARPA-style grantmaking is a specialized skill, and the wild animal welfare community has almost no people trained in it. Talent development activities will give the Wildlife Technology Fund a pipeline of program ideas and talent, and will increase grantmaking capacity across the broader animal welfare ecosystem.
Why Renaissance Philanthropy?
Renaissance Philanthropy provides a great infrastructure and support for designing and running funds like this. I’ve received amazing support so far on strategy, program design, fundraising, and more. For more on the Renaissance Philanthropy model, see here.
How can people support the Wildlife Technology Fund?
If you’re a scientist or otherwise a good fit to work on coordinating research programs in this area, or you’re interested in serving as an anchor donor for one of our programs, get in touch. If not, it helps a ton to just share our work (and the current job posting)!
Hi Mal.
Are you assuming the bees would prefer not existing? I suppose this is very uncertain.
I try to assume as little as possible! All of the listed ideas are proposed programs to be scoped, not things I'm launching immediately without further vetting.
That makes sense.