Marginal Funding to Support Novel Fish Welfare Interventions
Summary
FWI has an unusually large funding gap right now: $730K of our $920K 2025 budget.
Why donate to FWI? At an overall cost-effectiveness of about 1 fish helped per dollar, we’re probably not the most cost-effective organization right now at reducing immediate farmed animal suffering. However, we are investing in fairly novel interventions for helping fishes, such as satellite imagery monitoring and feed fortification, that we believe still make FWI a promising donation opportunity.
To learn more, you can see our Donation Page FAQ or our recent strategy post. Or just keep reading below!
The Value of Marginal Funding at Fish Welfare Initiative
As of this post’s date of publication, FWI currently has an unusually large funding gap for 2025. Specifically, we are still seeking to raise about $730,000 of our $920,000 2025 budget.
What impact and outcomes would your donation to FWI support? In terms of marginal cost-effectiveness, we roughly calculate that right now, donations to FWI help about 1 fish per dollar. These fishes are helped via water quality improvements or stocking density reductions, via our program that we run in India with currently 153 farms.
We’re still working to understand exactly the magnitude of improvement we make to these animals, so donations here should probably be regarded as less certain than, for instance, donations that advance cage-free or the Better Chicken Commitment for chickens. You can learn more about our thinking on our impact, and our process of estimating it, on our Impact Page.
In terms of pure cost-effectiveness, FWI is unlikely to be the most effective animal-focused organization to give to right now. For instance, both Shrimp Welfare Project (our archrivals) and the Aquatic Life Institute seem to be able to help aquatic animals more effectively than FWI (we also respect both of these organizations, and would encourage you to consider donating to them!).
We do (perhaps obviously) still believe that there are various reasons that make FWI an unusually promising donation opportunity:
Investment in more cost-effective interventions in the future: About 67% of our current budget (specifically our R&D, exploratory programs, and China budget items) goes not towards having an immediate impact, but rather towards developing more cost-effective interventions in the future. And we do this in what we believe is an unusually rigorous and on-the-ground way. For example, see our recent studies focused on developing interventions surrounding satellite imagery and feed fortification.
Investment in a moderately effective program right now: We estimate that we have currently improved the lives of about 2.2M fishes, and that our farm program has a programmatic cost effectiveness of about 7 fishes helped per dollar. (Our overall org cost effectiveness is about 1⁄7 this amount, as this is our one program aimed at generating an immediate impact and it only comprised about 1⁄7 of our operating budget in 2024.)
Investment in an extremely neglected group of animals: FWI is one of the few organizations working on behalf of Indian major carps, of which several billion are farmed each year. Additionally, we believe that the findings of our studies can be translated—with some contextual adjustments—to similar farming contexts, such as Indonesia, Bangladesh, and the Philippines, which also have massive, neglected groups of farmed fishes. For instance, in terms of the total weight of aquatic animals farmed, these countries are ranked 3rd, 5th, and 12th respectively; in total, they likely farm over 10B fishes each year combined.
Supporting fish advocacy in China: FWI is one of the few organizations that advocates for fishes in China. While we haven’t had any immediate impact there in terms of fishes directly helped, we believe our work (e.g.) has been significant in advancing the idea of fish welfare in the country where nearly half of the world’s farmed fishes live—likely the most important country for the aquatic animal advocacy movement.
Programs that Marginal Funds will Support
Marginal donations will support the following programs in 2025:
1–2 further studies on remote water quality monitoring, using either satellites or possibly drones, to develop this into a program to monitor and improve water quality at scale. See previous study.
Potentially 1 further study on feed fortification as a welfare improvement. In 2024 we ran an efficacy study under controlled conditions, and are now awaiting the findings. If they are positive, we will run a field study in 2025 to evaluate whether feed fortification improves welfare in real-world farm conditions.
An early-stage investigation into pre-slaughter stunning: In early 2025, we expect to receive the results from several short studies commissioned through our recently released request for proposals (RFP). If the findings are promising, in the latter half of 2025 we plan to transition to either pilot testing or initiating technological development.
Increasing the cost-effectiveness, scalability and evidence base of our farm program, the Alliance for Responsible Aquaculture. In 2025, we plan to a) work to improve it to meet our minimum scaling thresholds, and b) conduct an outcomes evaluation on the efficacy of our water quality corrective actions. We also aim to improve the lives of 1M fishes with this program.
Policy advocacy in India, which operates at the central and state government levels in order to advance policies that promote fish welfare.
Our growing program in China, for which we intend to release a job description for our first local full-time staff member in the coming weeks. In 2025, with this new China Lead staffer, we intend to continue our field-building work (e.g.), including developing species-specific standards with our local partner ICCAW.
Learn More
If you’re interested in learning more, the following resources may be helpful:
The FAQ on our donation page (where you can also donate if you feel so compelled)
Our recent strategy update post, which gets more into the weeds about our current plans
You are also welcome to contact us directly.
And whether or not you end up donating to Fish Welfare Initiative, we’re grateful for all the people out there who are giving away their money to make the world a better place. Thank you!
We’re also grateful to Jan Gaida for giving helpful suggestions to this post.
Thanks for including the fish-per-dollar estimate! I know it doesn’t account for the value of your speculative work, but having the number at all makes it a lot easier for me to reason about it.