Editorial note The Global Health and Development (GHD) team at Rethink Priorities (RP) periodically assesses its approach to impactful research and exploring promising lines of work going forward. This…

The first of a two-part series on anti-deforestation initiatives, this report examines the feasibility and cost-effectiveness of the REDD+ framework for reducing forest loss and degradation and for abating CO2 emissions that contribute to climate change.

This post summarizes research that Rethink conducted in December 2021 into the state of climate philanthropy—including the amount that has been committed, how it is allocated, and the identity of major funders—as well as a comparison with public and private climate funding.

This report is a “shallow” investigation commissioned by Open Philanthropy. This primary focus of the report is to assess weather forecasting as a potential agricultural intervention in low- and lower-middle income countries and to examine the cost-effectiveness of different interventions.

Nuclear attacks on cities would likely produce much more smoke than attacks on missile silos, military bases, and other nuclear arsenal targets. This is mainly because cities have much more flammable material to burn than the remote wildlands — mostly cropland and grasslands — that surround, for example, missile silos. This leads me to conclude that a nuclear war between the US and Russia would likely produce closer to 31 teragrams of smoke (90% confidence interval: 14 Tg to 68 Tg of smoke) — suggesting that nuclear winter is not as synonymous with US-Russia nuclear war as many effective altruists seem to assume. The ~31 teragrams of smoke that would be vaulted into the atmosphere would undoubtedly produce severe climate effects, likely leading to food shortfalls and regional famines, and killing between 36% and 96% of the world population.

Global Poverty remains the most popular single cause in our sample as a whole. When pressed to choose only one of the traditional broad cause areas of EA (Global Poverty, Animal Welfare, Meta, Long Term Future, Other) the Long Term Future/Catastrophic and Existential Risk Reduction is the most popular (41%). 42% of EAs have changed their cause area focus since they joined the movement. A majority (57%) of those who changed cause moved away from Global Poverty, and a majority (54%) moved towards the Long Term Future/Catastrophic and Existential Risk Reduction.

  Key points We surveyed UK respondents, asking them to list (without prompting) the three factors they thought most likely to cause human extinction in the next 100 years. We…

EAs rate a wide variety of different causes as requiring “significant resources”. Global Poverty remains the most popular single cause in our sample as a whole. There are substantial differences in cause prioritisation across groups. On the whole, more involved groups appear to prioritise Global Poverty and Climate Change less and AI and Long-Term Future causes more.

At any given time there are more than a trillion managed honey bees. Globally, the number of managed colonies has risen steadily over the last twenty years and this growth will almost certainly persist, at least in the short term. Increases in demand for honey and (especially) commercial pollination services continue to outpace the increase in supply of managed bees. Asia, especially China and India, hosts the largest populations of managed bees and accounts for much of the recent growth in bee stocks. Commercial beekeeping techniques standardly treat managed bees as a resource from which to maximize the extraction of value. Beekeepers have a financial incentive to maintain the health of their colonies, but they have little reason to look after the welfare of individual bees. Managed bees suffer from a variety of problems, including pesticide exposure, poor nutrition due to inadequate access to natural forage, invasive hive inspections and honey harvest, stress from long-distance transport, and parasite and pathogen spread exacerbated by common management techniques.

This report explores using AI to increase the effectiveness of human-wildlife conflict (HWC) mitigations in order to benefit wild animal welfare (WAW). Two concrete examples are providing more funding, research, and direct work into reducing fatalities due to 1) collisions between bats and wind turbines, and 2) culling crop-raiding starlings. The report aims merely to raise awareness of this topic and introduce the idea for discussion, but does not yet strongly suggest it is a cost-effective intervention on par with other interventions.