Dear EA’ers. I became familiar with the EA concept and community while I was a moral philosophy student, I trust this community can help me out. A little back story: I recently became successful in the crypto sphere. Because of that I would really like to help protect the Amazon rainforest from the fires and destruction, it breaks my heart when I see how fast unique wild animal habitat is disappearing, and of course the effects this will have on our entire planet. Now I want to figure out a way where I can really make an impact. The only charity I’ve seen that is involved is the WWF, I would like to hear your thoughts on their efficacy if you have any, or if you can suggest better charities. It would be really convenient if we could actually make the donation in ETH as that would spare us of a lot of hassle and payment of fees. We don’t really have a final number yet that we want to donate, but it will be at least 2 ETH (approx. 6000 US dollars), we’re thinking that might become more. Would love to hear your thoughts.
Hi Iris Amazon, thank you for your interest in helping the Amazon rainforest in the most effective way possible.
I founded SoGive, an organisation which aims to help donors get EA-based answers to questions such as these. We have not done a careful review of this question, so this comment is off-the-cuff.
I suspect that the best way to help the rainforest is probably to support an animal welfare charity.
Avoiding deforestation is intrinsically effective at preserving the rainforest, and also deforestation is likely to cause forest fires (see, e.g., Cardil et al 2020; note that a fuller analysis would seek to understand your goals better to ensure that tackling deforestation really achieves what you’re aiming for)
I understand that Amazon deforestation is mostly caused by cattle ranching (63% according to this source, which cites World Resources Institute using Hansen et al 2019, 80% according to this source; note that a fuller analysis would fact-check these sources further and seek to understand how the numbers were derived)
My best guess is that the Good Food Institute is best charity to donate to for this. In case I haven’t made it clear enough thus far, this is a caveated recommendation.
Good Food Institute (GFI)
GFI works to accelerate alternative protein innovation (i.e. plant-based meat or cultivated/lab-made meat). It does this through lobbying, research and other activities.
We have not done a review of GFI. You can find the Animal Charity Evaluators review of GFI here. I cannot vouch for the quality of Animal Charity Evaluators because we haven’t reviewed their work carefully enough yet, although we plan to.
A major downside of GFI is that their work will take time, and may not be suitable if you seek immediate impact.
Why GFI and not another animal charity?
As this comment is not a rigorous review, I can’t be confident that GFI is the best choice. However, I looked briefly at the Animal-Charity-Evaluators-recommended charities, and observed that their recommendations tend to help animals like chickens, or perhaps fish, but less so cows. This makes sense given that Animal Charity Evaluators focuses on animal welfare, which is much worse for industrially farmed chicken than for most ruminants, such as cows. GFI’s work is more systemic and therefore could impact cows as well.
It is certainly possible that another charity is more effective at preventing cattle ranching without me knowing about it. A fuller review would explore this question further.
Is tackling animal product demand definitely the right choice?
Just because we have a chart showing that most of the Amazonian deforestation is caused by cattle ranching, that doesn’t necessarily mean that stopping the cattle ranching will stop the deforestation.
For example, it may be that the land will continue to be sought after, but for another purpose (e.g. I understand that palm oil mostly happens in other rainforest-rich countries at the moment, but that there are plans afoot to increase palm oil production in Brazil).
This is yet another area which would need a fuller review in order to have confidence in the recommendation.
If the recommendation turns out to be wrong, I suspect that this is most likely to be the cause.
Why not a charity which works directly to counter deforestation?
It may seem counter-intuitive to suggest a charity which doesn’t directly work with rainforests. Below I set out some specific examples of charities working directly with rainforests. We haven’t done a full review of all such charities.
However several interventions working with rainforest protection suffer from risks such as leakage (aka displacement; i.e. if you protect one area of rainforest, will the logger simply go elsewhere). Also the weakness of land rights may render some rainforest preservation methods less effective.
This isn’t to say that all rainforest conservation work is doomed to failure, only that it’s hard, and that we haven’t found decent evidence of a rainforest charity overcoming these hurdles.
WWF
SoGive has written a shallow, public-information-only review on WWF, which can be found here:
https://app.sogive.org/#charity?charityId=wwf-uk
You may find the write-up interesting for its summary of WWF’s work, but in short it found that we don’t have enough information to form a view on WWF’s effectiveness.
An assessment of “more information needed” might sound like it doesn’t tell us much, however donors in the EA movement often have a sceptical prior on charity impact (i.e. they believe that achieving impact is hard, and in the absence of evidence we should likely assume that the charity isn’t achieving much impact).
Assuming that you too share this sceptical prior, then you may be interested in a charity which is supported by the EA community. The EA community largely supports a recommendation of a donation to GFI, however here are a couple of other EA recommendations:
CfRN
Founders Pledge (an EA-aligned group whose analysis I have partially reviewed and believe to be generally good) used to recommend donations to Coalition for Rainforest Nations (CfRN). CfRN runs a scheme called REDD+, which allows donors to donate to prevent deforestation.
SoGive wrote a report on why we were more cautious than Founders Pledge about the CfRN recommendation.
Since then, I understand that Founders Pledge no longer recommends CfRN (I’m not claiming that their change is caused by the SoGive report; if you want to know why their opinion changed it’s best to ask them).
There are further concerns about REDD+ which were not fully outlined in that report, such as the nuances of determining the reference level / counterfactual (i.e. the thorny question of what would have happened to the forests otherwise).
However it is useful to recognise some positives: there is a real lack of carbon offset schemes that are effective at scale, and REDD+ could be that solution, especially since it’s recognised by the UN and built into the Paris Agreement.
Cool Earth
Cool Earth used to be recommended by Giving What We Can when they did charity analysis. Cool Earth aims to protect rainforests by supporting the indigenous communities living in the rainforests.
We at SoGive believe that certain elements of the GWWC analysis were not given enough credit, as set out here. For example, it didn’t give enough credit to what displacement / leakage.
One might imagine that if Cool Earth expanded enough, there would be so much rainforest protected that loggers would have nowhere to go. The fact that only 20% of rainforest is inhabited by indigenous peoples suggests that for at least some types of logger, this isn’t credible.
Hey Iris, I think it’s wonderful that you want to help protect natural habitats. I don’t know of any charities like the ones you’re describing offhand, but when I’m looking at new charities I try to figure out:
-What does the charity actually do day to day? What will my money be buying? (i.e. research staff time, new equipment)
-How much equipment, staff time, etc can I get for each $1000 I spend?
-What do I think that money will achieve? For example, how many acres of the Amazon could my donation protect, and for how long? (This is the hardest part but I try to give my best guess)
Good luck with your search and please let us know what you find! :)