6 months later, readers might be interested in this recent 80,000 Hours article about the 95% statistic.
Hugh P
Karma: 223
I’m excited to read this series.
I remember trying (very briefly) to look into what ecosystem services are thought to be most important, and personally I failed to find a justification for the very strong claims you see about them, such as being crucial to survival and so on. For example, if insects disappeared, it seems like we would survive fine on wind-pollinated crops. I came away suspecting motivated reasoning due to people liking “nature” for other reasons.
But I wasn’t able to come to any confident conclusion, so I’m looking forward to finding out what yours was! Very much a topic that could benefit from a critical approach; there seem to be quite a lot of aspects to disentangle.
There are two UK government consultations closing March 9th, for: (1) banning cages for 7 million hens, and (2) reducing the pain that castration and tail docking practices for lambs cause, such as requiring pain relief. In the UK are 7 million hens (21%) still in cages, and roughly 17 million lambs that go through these painful procedures every year.
You can use these guides to make your response, to make these changes more likely to happen:
Hens: https://tinyurl.com/cage-consultation
Lambs: https://tinyurl.com/lamb-consultationIf you prefer, you can sign up for this online event on Sunday 5pm-6pm UTC, where we’ll be writing and submitting our responses together.
Hi, was this study published?
Net negative because it is a true statement? Or some other reason?
Some good news since this post was written a few years ago: the usage of cleaner fish in Norway has declined from a peak of 60 million in 2019 to 24 million in 2024.[1] From what I’ve read this seems to be due to both pressure from the media and Norwegian authorities[2] and also growing use of other methods like laser delousing, which showed positive results in a recent study.[3] (I wasn’t able to tell how important each factor was in causing this decline.)
More good news is that the country with the second largest salmon industry, Chile, has not started using cleaner fish:The species used in Norway are banned in Chile because they’re not native there.[4]
It was reported in 2018 that species native to Chile were being trialed use on Chilean salmon farms.[5]
However, a 2023 article says “In both cases, preliminary trials [2015-2019] have been unsuccessful”.[6]
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Rethink Priorities, 21 November 2025: Mapping salmon welfare: sea lice treatments. (Thanks to @Hannah McKay🔸 and @Sagar K Shah for your work.)
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For example “The Norwegian Council for Animal Ethics [an independent advisory body] has stated that continuing the use of cleaner-fish is not justifiable.” (from the Norwegian Veterinary Authority Fish Health Report 2024, p. 96.), or public criticism from the Norwegian Food Safety Authority.
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Fishfarmingexpert, 1 September 2025: Significantly fewer treatments needed at farms with lice lasers. The study says “Sites with optical delousing used on average fewer cleaner fish.” You can see what the laser system looks like in operation in this video.
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Bravo and Treasurer, 2023: The management of the sea lice in Chile: A review
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Centre for Wild Animal Welfare (and the EA Animal Welfare Fund earlier this year)
When people write about where they donate, aren’t they implicitly giving a ranking?
Is there a way to donate that lets UK donors claim Gift Aid? Your page at every.org doesn’t seem to have this (though I like the built-in ability for supporters to start a fundraiser).
In its current form, Arthropoda costs about $175K per year […] We’re about $55K short for 2026
A possibly naive question — does this mean:Arthropoda needs $55k to remain at the same level of funding (inflation-adjusted) as 2025?
Or that Arthropoda needs $55k to fulfil its 2026 plan, which may involve an increase (or decrease) in funding?
Or is $55k the overall “room for more funding” in some other sense?
The ban on fur farming in the UK [...] didn’t lead to an increase in imports for fur
There’s some data from the ONS on this, graph below. Here’s the fur data separately (see the “Whole world” row). The ban took effect on 1 Jan 2003. So this seems to be true, although I guess demand for fur was already falling.
Interesting. Then I guess strictly speaking it makes more sense to speak only of the welfare footprint of products, rather than of a whole person’s carbon footprint, unlike how we speak of both products and people having carbon footprints.
Potential opportunity to influence the World Bank away from financing factory farms: The UK Parliament is currently holding an open consultation on the future of UK aid and development assistance, closing on November 14, 2025. It includes the question, “Where is reform needed in multilateral agencies and development banks the UK is a member of, and funds?”. This would include the World Bank, which finances factory farms,[1][2] so could this consultation be a way to push it away from doing that, via the UK government?
Are any organisations planning on submitting responses? If so, should there be an effort to co-ordinate more responses on this?- ^
“Why the World Bank Must Stop Funding Factory Farms”, 30 Apr 2024 https://www.worldanimalprotection.us/latest/blogs/why-the-world-bank-must-stop-funding-factory-farms/
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“The World Bank has a factory-farm climate problem”, 20 Nov 2024 https://grist.org/food-and-agriculture/world-bank-development-banks-factory-farm-climate-industrial-agriculture/
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Just listened to the first episode and thoroughly enjoyed it, you’re very funny people (:
Yes, this is a good point—perhaps you could speak of “the dairy industry’s welfare footprint” if you sought to avoid this.
Though I guess people could only support policy change that tried to, for example, reduce flying in favour of travel by train, if they are first aware of the differences in emissions (254g vs 6g per km apparently), rather than just being aware that both release some emissions—and perhaps the idea of carbon footprints helped popularise that there are such big differences (?)
But maybe there’s something about the term “footprint” which is too closely tied to individual behaviour, and a better term could be found.
I think the term “welfare footprint” (analogous to the term “carbon footprint”) is extremely useful, and we should make stronger attempts to popularise it among the public as a quick way to encapsulate the idea that different animal products have vastly different welfare harms, e.g. milk vs eggs.
(You might already be aware but I think that website you linked is just LLM-generated articles. They’re quite difficult to avoid on search engines these days. The information might still be accurate of course.)
Regarding the number of crop deaths caused by plant agriculture, it’s difficult to draw firm conclusions based on the limited data currently available, as discussed in the section “Fishing vs. Crop Deaths”.
That section states
While reliable data on crop deaths is extremely limited[27], it is plausible that these crop deaths may carry a higher total moral cost than fishing sardines and anchovies.
I thought I’d expand on this claim a bit, as I agree with @Erich_Grunewald 🔸 it seems cruxy.
Ultimately I agree, though if I were deriving my opinion solely on the citated paper, “Field Deaths in Plant Agriculture”,[1] the initial calculation based on it makes it seem unlikely. The paper says “Our overall estimate should still be much lower than the one we mentioned at the outset [even if we are morally responsible for deaths from predation]”, which is “over 7.3 billion animals killed each year”. That’s roughly 1 animal killed per human per year.[2] If we estimate mean calorie intake to be 2500 kcal per day, 365.25 days per year, that’s 913,125 kcal per year, for 1 death. 1 sardine is 47kcal,[3] so the initial rough comparison of 913,125⁄47 means that sardines cause 19,428x as many deaths per calorie as crops, excluding insects.
Importantly, the “7.3 billion animals” does not include insects, but, based on Tomasik 2016, cropland probably typically has lower Net Primary Productivity, and lower insect populations, which is probably a good thing (assuming the insects have net-negative lives). So that suggests eating crops has a positive moral impact, despite crop deaths.
However, considering this post, I come to agree with your position that it is plausible that “crop deaths may carry a higher total moral cost than fishing sardines and anchovies” (i.e. that it is plausible that fishing sardines has a positive impact which is greater than the positive impact of farming crops).- ^
Fischer, B., & Lamey, A. (2018). Field Deaths in Plant Agriculture. Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 31, 409–428. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10806-018-9733-8
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Human population surpassed 7.3 billion in 2014: https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/world-population-by-year/
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Biodiversity plays a key role in maintaining ecosystem resilience by providing redundancy and adaptability. As it declines, ecosystems become more fragile, raising not only the risk of widespread species loss but also the risk of human extinction, given our dependence on functioning ecosystems.
Is it true that humans depend on functioning ecosystems, in the sense avoiding extinction—or even in the sense of >5% of human lives relying on them?
A lot of the examples[1] I’ve seen are doubtful, e.g. pollination is sometimes given as an example of an ecosystem service, but staple crops like wheat are wind-pollinated, and domesticated bees are used for the crops that require insect pollination.
Edit: More on the pollination example:
Yields would decline 5-10% without pollinators,[2] and “Non-bees performed 25–50% of the total number of flower visits [...] pollination services rendered by non-bees [are] similar to those provided by bees.”[3] So if you were to naively combine these, it might mean that yields would decline 2.5-5% if wild pollinators disappeared.- ^
Such as in this Claude Sonnet 4 chat
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Rader, R., et al. (2016). “Non-bee insects are important contributors to global crop pollination.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 113(1), 146-151. https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1517092112
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It seems like you’re drawing a connection between the Leverage stuff and “EA 2.0” without really justifying that.