Does biodiversity loss warrant being it’s own cause area?

I don't believe biodiversity is an important cause area, for basically two reasons:

1. Species themselves are not inherently valuable. The experiences of individual conscious animals are what's valuable, and the welfare of wild animals is basically orthogonal to biodiversity, at least as far as anyone can tell—even if biodiversity and wild animal welfare are positively correlated, I've never seen a good argument to that effect, and surely increasing biodiversity isn't the best way to improve wild animal welfare.
2. You could perhaps argue that loss of biodiversity poses an existential threat to humanity, which matters more for the long-run future than wild animal welfare. But it seems like a very weak x-risk compared to things like AGI or nuclear war.

Most people who prioritize biodiversity (IMO) don't seem to understand what actually matters, and they act as if a species is a unit of inherent value, when it isn't—the unit of value is an individual's conscious experience. If you wanted to ague that biodiversity should be a high priority, you'd have to claim either that (1) increasing biodiversity is a particularly effective way of improving wild animal welfare or (2) loss of biodiversity constitutes a meaningful existential risk. I've never seen a good argument for either of those positions, but an argument might exist.

(Or you could argue that biodiversity is very important for some third reason, but it seems unlikely to me that there could be any third reason that's important enough to be worth spending EA resources on.)

I think it certainly deserves an assessment. But I myself have been postponing reading Dasgupta's review for months.
On the other hand, I wonder if it might overlap or conflict with wild animal welfare.

Thank you for doing this, very important and potentially it helps undo a mistake I made in my 20s: prioritising climate and neglecting biodiversity. (Sorry!)

I'd like to encourage this on grounds of:

A. Long-termism, life extension and ultimate value: 

• Climate will eventually be stabilized, but biodiversity, once lost, is gone forever*. 
• Certain species may have within them the compounds/RNA/DNA needed for life extension. 
• More prosaically, imagine if cats, coffee, chocolate and vincristine** had gone extinct before we realised we liked or needed them! 

B. Beauty:

• This is non trivial, even in classical utilitarianism. 
• Minor example: think of the pleasure we can all have from nature documentaries knowing that those animals and plants are still doing fine.
• With preference utilitarianism or Maslow's Being Values it becomes even more obvious that this matters a lot.

C. Neglectedness-within-EA 
(compared to climate change and non biological cause areas)

Both philosophy and IT/mathematics/computing tend  to attract people with a particular group of interests. If we continue to have less attention to biological fields than AI and suffering, we'll over time have fewer and fewer EAs with an interest in life sciences.

* especially those species we haven't even identified! Also, gene banking or even seed/gamete banking is notoriously unreliable, so there is no sure and easy hack.

** a fungus that is the basis for many cancer treatments

My basic answer is no, and there are some reasons for this:

In the ITN framework, the N is very bad for biodiversity loss. Many organizations and a lot of money is done for this problem. There is a lot of attention given to it already, we don't need to do more work.

Similarly, for the I condition to be anything other than very little, it requires essentially stagnation right now for tens of thousands of years in order to be import. Evolution is slow with multicellular organisms, and environments change slowly unless perturbed. Needless to say, that's not impossible, but very unlikely, even if you don't agree on the most important century series by Holden Karnofsky (I do.)

Finally, the tractability is actually medium, so won't talk about that much.

Thus biodiversity loss has very low priority, and the only thing we should do is own a gene bank and try to get species endangered in the gene bank, similar to seed banks nowadays.

I enjoy this prompt to add a few thoughts into this thread, it inspired me to think in a new direction.  These thoughts aren't a direct response to the prompt, rather some thinking around the edges.

I already see cause areas as interconnected areas of interest, and as EAs 'define' a cause area, we are creating a distinction that says that this area/theory of change is meaningfully different from others.  This kind of categorical thinking feels less useful for me when describing overlapping fields, which are strongly connected through a myriad of relationships.  The comparisons between the 'cause areas' of climate change vs wild animal wellfare vs biodiversity loss are meaningfully different lenses of (what feels to me) the same territory.

So I mentally rephrase the question into something like: If one cares about life on Earth, what do we see through the lens of biodiversity?

What I'm seeing (as I sit on my front porch in downtown Toronto), is a vast web/network - of inter-related individuals and species, each playing a role in an ecosystem in balance (more or less).  I can imagine over time, more and more of the nodes disappearing, causing many relationships to disappear.  From network theory, this loss of redundancy may increase the fragility of the overall system, and shifting the overall network dynamics in often non-linear and unpredictable ways.

How many nodes can be removed before the autopoiesis* fails?

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What other things do EAs see if we look at planetary health through the lens of biodiversity?  What are the blindspots inherent in viewing 'planetary health' through other "certified EA cause area" lenses?

Shameless plug: I'm interested in helping parts of EA to talk to one another, and in having EA interact with other movements also making the world a better place.  If you like looking at the interconnections between things, and integrating different models into meta-models, feel free to reach out to me!

*Autopoiesis refers to a system capable of producing and maintaining itself by creating its own parts

New here! I don't have deep knowledge on these topics, but I would say yes.

From my limited research into permaculture/regenerative agriculture, it sounds like biodiversity and climate change aren't just linked in a 'climate change will devastate many species' way, but rather they impact one another in a feedback loop.

For example, deep root systems provide channels for water to seep into the earth. Shade from trees cools the ground. Some methods of regenerative agriculture, including animal agriculture, claim to be carbon sequestering rather than carbon emitting.

I've heard many people in Mexico say that the Mayan civilization likely collapsed due to overfarming, deforestation and drought, the idea being that the first two actually caused the latter. Projects like Greening the Desert in Jordan (not so long ago the fertile crescent!) add credence to this idea.
https://www.greeningthedesertproject.org/

On X Risk: the majority of oxygen on earth is produced by phytoplankton in the ocean, and we know that whale migration patterns are an important part of this system, their poop acting as fertilizer. Is it possible that if we lost whales, maybe due to overfishing, the phytoplankton population could collapse rapidly and cause earth to be unliveable for those of us who need to breathe???

Idk! That's scary.

Finally, I would make the case that beauty isn't just some arbitrary aesthetic thing that only merits preservation for however human enjoyment fits into a utilitarian calculation. Our aesthetic tastes evolved over millions of years, and they are powerful drivers. Clearly they were selected for.

Perhaps they are there to help us recognize healthy systems as beautiful- whether they be people, ecosystems, rivers, or complex patterns reminiscent of those healthy systems ("sacred geometry," music, etc).

Loss of biodiversity is intuitively ugly and tragic to most people. I think we should listen to that even if we don't currently have good theory to understand the full importance, or we may find out too late.

I think biodiversity loss probably does warrant its own cause area. Animal welfare isn't a particularly compelling cause area for me personally, so I'm making this statement purely based on the risk biodiversity loss could pose to the world economy. 

Is it Important?

Our economy is so heavily dependent on wild ecosystems that last year The Economist ran a special report that claimed "Loss of biodiversity poses as great a risk to humanity as climate change".  People havn't built the models necessary to make that statement quantitatively, but the qualitative arguments and disturbing results from modeling biodiversity loss in smaller ecosystems seem strong enough that we should prioritize building these models to see what we find. For example, in one study discussed in The Economist, scientists studying diverse ecosystems around the world found that once 80% of plant life was gone, entire food chains began to collapse and could not be rebuilt by simply restoring the plants. More than 75% of global food-crop types are pollinated by animals [1]. Could we irreversibly lose a food chain these crops depend on as we dramatically eliminate vegetation to accommodate our growing population and wealth? I don't want to find out the hard way. Perhaps there are ways of replacing the food chains our economy depends on, but perhaps there are not, or the costs of preservation are dramatically lower than the costs of replacement. Scientists still haven't figured out what causes Colony Collapse Disorder despite how important bees are to our economy [2]. This makes me nervous about our ability to promptly find a replacement if it comes back much worse or another ecosystem we depend on collapses.

Is it Neglected?

Lots of people seem to care about biodiversity, but they rarely seem do so using the analytical EA approach. Research and outreach that makes it easier for them to target their efforts towards the most effective options as we've done in global health and development could be very high impact. 

Is it Tractable?

One reason biodiversity models are so far behind climate models is the difficulty of the problem, but researchers do seem to be chipping away at it, so maybe more researchers and funding would chip away at it faster. Furthermore, improvements in AI and sensors have made this problem substantially more tractable in recent years. 

The Economist argues that one of the most important interventions right now would be just organizing all the data we're collecting into central hubs so that researchers and other people interested in using it to help can access it. That seems very tractable compared to many problems in EA.

Whether biodiversity is more high impact than other EA cause areas is beyond my ability to determine. But this special report in The Economist does make it sound similar.

[1] https://www.economist.com/technology-quarterly/2021-06-19

[2] https://www.epa.gov/pollinator-protection/colony-collapse-disorder#why%20it%20is%20happening

Ask first if biodiversity is valuable. There are good reasons to think it is not, at least if properly understood in terms of "diversity". I wrote a summary of an important but overlooked book  here: https://jkathage.substack.com/p/whats-so-good-about-biodiversity

I don't think biodiversity is good, in fact it's probably bad. If we replaced natural ecosystems with curated ones, we'd have much less of a problem with zoonotic transmissions creating new diseases and pests, probably better nature aesthetics, and maybe some ability to use ecosystems to remove pollutants that are currently hard to get rid of.

It's important to remember that most of the US population was exposed to a significant amount of environmentalist propaganda as children, before they were able to think critically, and that there were falsehoods embedded in that propaganda. Ecosystems do not spontaneously turn into wastelands when they're perturbed; they mostly turn into boring forests and things like that.

I see biodiversity / ecosystem loss as the original environmental concern. Climate change has surpassed this area in importance, and there are legitimate grounds for this. Climate change has the potential to be a major cause of ecosystems/ biodiversity loss. One issue with this perspective is that the less biodiversity we have, the harder it will be for ecosystems to adapt to climate change. (BAppSc: Enviro Management)

I am very curious: are there any follow ups on this post? Any updates of (ongoing) actions that are taken within the EA community with regards to biodiversity loss?

Thank you for doing this, very important and potentially it helps undo a mistake I made in my 20s: prioritising climate and neglecting biodiversity. (Sorry!) Can I clarify: is the topic biodiversity or mass extinction prevention? Both are valid, but strategies and timescales for both actions and outcomes could be very different.

I'd like to encourage both biodiversity protection and mass extinction prevention on grounds of:

A. Long-termism, life extension and ultimate value: 

• Climate will eventually be stabilized, but biodiversity, once lost, is gone forever*.
• Certain species may have within them the compounds/RNA/DNA needed for life extension.
• More prosaically, imagine if cats, coffee, chocolate and vincristine** had gone extinct before we realised we liked or needed them!

B. Beauty:

• This is non trivial, even in classical utilitarianism.
• Minor example: think of the pleasure we can all have from nature documentaries knowing that those animals and plants are still doing fine.
• With preference utilitarianism or Maslow's Being Values it becomes even more obvious that this matters a lot.

C. Neglectedness-within-EA 
(compared to climate change and non biological cause areas)

Both philosophy and IT/mathematics/computing tend  to attract people with a particular group of interests. If we continue to have less attention to biological fields than AI and suffering, we'll over time have fewer and fewer EAs with an interest in life sciences.

* especially those species we haven't even identified! Also, gene banking or even seed/gamete banking is notoriously unreliable, so there is no sure and easy hack.

** a fungus that is the basis for many cancer treatments