We are undergoing a major species extinction on planet earth, the 6th in the history of the planet. The biodiversity of life that has taken billions of years to evolve is rapidly disappearing. https://earth.org/data_visualization/biodiversity-loss-in-numbers-the-2020-wwf-report/
Yet Effective Alturism organization neglects to include this as an issue worth funding. There is an allocation of funding for climate change of which biodiversity loss is partly included, but climate change is not the current driver for much of the preventable species extinction nd biodiversity loss occurring on the planet right now.
Myself and other concerned EA members would like to know what rational is used to justify this arguably huge important issue from being excluded from EA work? And what work would need to be done to demonstrate the importance of this issue in order to persuade EA organization this is worth directly including as part of the funding and resource allocation?
For the second point, I think it's a controversial position whether wild animals have net negative lives, and I think the field overall (that is people, working on wild animal welfare) does not have a strong position on it.
I think the first dot point deserves fleshing out. I have done a very preliminary analysis of getting prepared with resilient foods for agricultural catastrophes such as nuclear winter, and it appears that this is a very cost-effective way of saving species. This is because if many people were starving, not only would they generally not care about preventing other species from going extinct due to the climate impacts, but they would likely actively eat many species to extinction. It would not take that much more work to turn this into an actual paper, and ... (read more)