Thanks for doing this, I appreciate the transparency in the calculations and write-ups. I have a few comments.
One possible considerations in biorisk is Kevin Esvelt’s argument about declining costs of gene synthesis and the potential democratisation of bio WMD. I think these risks are extremely troubling in the next 10-20 years, and much larger than other biorisks, but I don’t see much discussion of this argument in your post, and that might affect your conclusions.
I’m a bit surprised to see deforestation in there as a top priority. Have any pandemics in the past been caused by deforestation? this is a genuine question, I don’t know the answer. If I were focused on zoonoses, I think I would start with wild animal markets and factory farms, not deforestation, as this seems to have been what drove eg SARS and MERS. I notice that you assume that it costs $17 to avert a tonne of CO2 through forestry protection. After looking into this for some time, Johannes Ackva and I concluded that these numbers are too high probably by 1-2 orders of magnitude, and that lot of forestry protection probably has no effect. see the climate change page of the giving what we can website.
On deforestation. Just to be clear the result of our prioritisation exercise was our top recommendations (ideas 1-2) on subscription models for new antibiotics and stopping dangerous dual use research. The ideas 4-7 (including the deforestation one) did well in our early prioritisation but ultimately we did not recommend them. I have made a minor edit to the post to try to make this clearer.
The stopping deforestation report idea was originally focused on limiting the human animal interface to prevent zoonotic pandemics (which did well in our prioritisation). Then in the report we prioritise between the ways one might go about stopping zoonoses. The summary is:
Approach
Scale of issue
Impact of approach
Tractability
Neglected
Avoids risk of increasing pandemic risk
Externalities for other cause areas, e.g., climate, Animal welfare
Overall sense of how promising
Reduce deforestation
High
High
Moderate
Moderate
High
Unclear for animals
Positive for climate
High
Wild animal supply chain and trade regulation
High
Moderate
Low
Moderate
High
Neutral to slightly positive
Moderate
Education and/or regulation or biosecurity on farms
Moderate
Moderate
Low
High
High
Neutral to slightly positive
Moderate
Vaccination of animals
Low
Low
Moderate
High
High
Neutral to slightly positive
Low
Better detection at high-risk human-animal interface
Moderate
Low
Low- Moderate
Low
Moderate
Slightly negative
Low
Unfortunately the full report is not quite ready for publication. Hopefully the full report will be available soon.
We didn’t look into gene synthesis risks so might have missed something there. Although potentially a charity working on reducing dual use research could play a role in limiting these risks.
Thanks for doing this, I appreciate the transparency in the calculations and write-ups. I have a few comments.
One possible considerations in biorisk is Kevin Esvelt’s argument about declining costs of gene synthesis and the potential democratisation of bio WMD. I think these risks are extremely troubling in the next 10-20 years, and much larger than other biorisks, but I don’t see much discussion of this argument in your post, and that might affect your conclusions.
I’m a bit surprised to see deforestation in there as a top priority. Have any pandemics in the past been caused by deforestation? this is a genuine question, I don’t know the answer. If I were focused on zoonoses, I think I would start with wild animal markets and factory farms, not deforestation, as this seems to have been what drove eg SARS and MERS. I notice that you assume that it costs $17 to avert a tonne of CO2 through forestry protection. After looking into this for some time, Johannes Ackva and I concluded that these numbers are too high probably by 1-2 orders of magnitude, and that lot of forestry protection probably has no effect. see the climate change page of the giving what we can website.
Hi John.
Thank you for the feedback and comments.
On deforestation. Just to be clear the result of our prioritisation exercise was our top recommendations (ideas 1-2) on subscription models for new antibiotics and stopping dangerous dual use research. The ideas 4-7 (including the deforestation one) did well in our early prioritisation but ultimately we did not recommend them. I have made a minor edit to the post to try to make this clearer.
The stopping deforestation report idea was originally focused on limiting the human animal interface to prevent zoonotic pandemics (which did well in our prioritisation). Then in the report we prioritise between the ways one might go about stopping zoonoses. The summary is:
Unclear for animals
Positive for climate
High
Unfortunately the full report is not quite ready for publication. Hopefully the full report will be available soon.
Or $ per tCO2 were from two sources:
US$ 0.87-2.60/tCO2, from https://www.cifor.org/knowledge/publication/6188/
Average from REDD+ report at: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/LmjsyFvQavLQnYSTp/the-redd-framework-for-reducing-deforestation-and-mitigating#fnrefoyfcvbmm7tl
Sorry that we missed your estimate.
We didn’t look into gene synthesis risks so might have missed something there. Although potentially a charity working on reducing dual use research could play a role in limiting these risks.
Yes sorry that’s me not reading properly.