Great question! Multi-decade forecasts are hard, so take all these quick thoughts with some salt :)
Amount of funding in our space increases significantly. Sometimes I find it pretty inspiring to think that over the past decade or so, we have almost gone from no field really existing to a budding one. It has gone from <$20M/yr to ~$200M/yr. Predict (75%) that positive trend continues and we would be at >$500M/yr by 2040.
Alt-proteins have significant progress and are really important. Again, it can be inspiring to look back on our progress. Circa ~2015, GFI didn’t exist, alt-proteins were barely a thing. Now GFI is one of (if not the biggest) group in our space. Since, ~2015 we have also seen the 2.0 of PB alts. The likes of Beyond and Impossible suggest that taste and price-competitive alternatives for some animal products are likely, and we are actually now quite close to (if not at) parity for some product categories like beef patties. I predict that we would see this trend continue and there would be at least a couple of other product categories where we reach parity. I think 65% chance that we will see >5% of meat consumption be from alt-proteins. I am hopeful that we may even see some big government funding (scale: tens or hundreds of millions) in open access-research on pb alts, and think that the folks at Mobius have been doing some great work on this recently!
Movement becomes even more global. Again, past progress seems inspiring. We have gone from basically not much happening throughout large parts of Asia to now a number of groups active there. I would expect that general trend to continue and we will significantly scale up in the likes of Latin America, Africa, and the Middle-East, too.
Continue to expand on the neglected animal frontier. To an extent, I think that over twenty years for our movement we will see: fish become the new chicken, crustaceans the new fish, invertebrates the new crustaceans, wild animals as being established, etc. To flesh that out a bit I think that over that time we will see big groups (e.g., THL, MFA, CIWF, etc.) increasingly focus on fish through their corporate outreach efforts, and hopefully also a significant shift to also include farmed shrimp/prawns. Other farmed invertebrate’s welfare will also significantly move from the fringe to mainstream and some large groups will also incorporate that into their programmatic portfolio. Regarding wild animals, it feels a bit harder to say. On quick reflection, I would predict (75%) that area has at least 10 EA aligned NGOs active in it, with total size of the area at >$5M.
If you had to make some predictions about what the animal advocacy space will look like in 20 years, what would be different from today?
Great question! Multi-decade forecasts are hard, so take all these quick thoughts with some salt :)
Amount of funding in our space increases significantly. Sometimes I find it pretty inspiring to think that over the past decade or so, we have almost gone from no field really existing to a budding one. It has gone from <$20M/yr to ~$200M/yr. Predict (75%) that positive trend continues and we would be at >$500M/yr by 2040.
Alt-proteins have significant progress and are really important. Again, it can be inspiring to look back on our progress. Circa ~2015, GFI didn’t exist, alt-proteins were barely a thing. Now GFI is one of (if not the biggest) group in our space. Since, ~2015 we have also seen the 2.0 of PB alts. The likes of Beyond and Impossible suggest that taste and price-competitive alternatives for some animal products are likely, and we are actually now quite close to (if not at) parity for some product categories like beef patties. I predict that we would see this trend continue and there would be at least a couple of other product categories where we reach parity. I think 65% chance that we will see >5% of meat consumption be from alt-proteins. I am hopeful that we may even see some big government funding (scale: tens or hundreds of millions) in open access-research on pb alts, and think that the folks at Mobius have been doing some great work on this recently!
Movement becomes even more global. Again, past progress seems inspiring. We have gone from basically not much happening throughout large parts of Asia to now a number of groups active there. I would expect that general trend to continue and we will significantly scale up in the likes of Latin America, Africa, and the Middle-East, too.
Continue to expand on the neglected animal frontier. To an extent, I think that over twenty years for our movement we will see: fish become the new chicken, crustaceans the new fish, invertebrates the new crustaceans, wild animals as being established, etc. To flesh that out a bit I think that over that time we will see big groups (e.g., THL, MFA, CIWF, etc.) increasingly focus on fish through their corporate outreach efforts, and hopefully also a significant shift to also include farmed shrimp/prawns. Other farmed invertebrate’s welfare will also significantly move from the fringe to mainstream and some large groups will also incorporate that into their programmatic portfolio. Regarding wild animals, it feels a bit harder to say. On quick reflection, I would predict (75%) that area has at least 10 EA aligned NGOs active in it, with total size of the area at >$5M.