Thanks for this research! Do you know whether any BOTECs have been done where an intervention can be said to create X vegan-years per dollar? I’ve been considering writing an essay pointing meat eaters to cost-effective charitable offsets for meat consumption. So far, I haven’t found any rigorous estimates online.
(I think farmed animal welfare interventions are likely even more cost-effective and have a higher probability of being net positive. But it seems really difficult to know how to trade off the moral value of chickens taken out of cages / shrimp stunned versus averting some number of years of meat consumption.)
To the best of my recollection, the only paper in our dataset that provides a cost-benefit estimation is Jalil et al. (2023)
Calculations indicate a high return on investment even under conservative assumptions (~US$14 per metric ton CO2eq). Our findings show that informational interventions can be cost effective and generate long-lasting shifts towards more sustainable food options.
There’s also a red/processed meat study—Emmons et al. (2005) --- that does some cost-effectiveness analyses, but it’s almost 20 years old and its reporting is really sparse: changes to the eating environment “were not reported in detail, precluding more detailed analyses of this intervention.” So I’d stick with Jalil et al. to get a sense of ballpark estimates.
Thanks for this research! Do you know whether any BOTECs have been done where an intervention can be said to create X vegan-years per dollar? I’ve been considering writing an essay pointing meat eaters to cost-effective charitable offsets for meat consumption. So far, I haven’t found any rigorous estimates online.
(I think farmed animal welfare interventions are likely even more cost-effective and have a higher probability of being net positive. But it seems really difficult to know how to trade off the moral value of chickens taken out of cages / shrimp stunned versus averting some number of years of meat consumption.)
👋 Our pleasure!
To the best of my recollection, the only paper in our dataset that provides a cost-benefit estimation is Jalil et al. (2023)
There’s also a red/processed meat study—Emmons et al. (2005) --- that does some cost-effectiveness analyses, but it’s almost 20 years old and its reporting is really sparse: changes to the eating environment “were not reported in detail, precluding more detailed analyses of this intervention.” So I’d stick with Jalil et al. to get a sense of ballpark estimates.