Why Isn't EA at the Table When $121 Billion Gets Allocated to Biodiversity Every Year?

By David Goodman @ 2026-01-20T13:30 (+54)

There is an insane amount of money being thrown around by international organizations and agreements. Nobody with any kind of power over these agreements is asking basic EA questions like: "What are the problems we're trying to solve?" "What are the most neglected aspects of those problems?" and "What is the most cost-effective way to address those neglected areas?"

As someone coming from an EA background reading through plans for $200-700 billion in annual funding commitments that focus on unimaginative and ineffective interventions, it makes you want to tear your hair out. So much good could be done with that money.

EA focuses a lot on private philanthropy, earning-to-give (though less so post-SBF), and the usual pots of money. But why don't we have delegations who are knowledgeable in international diplomacy going to COPs and advocating for more investment in lab-grown meat, alternative proteins, or lithium recycling? It seems like there would be insane alpha in such a strategy.

An example: The Global Biodiversity Framework

The Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF) was adopted in 2022 to halt biodiversity loss. It has 23 targets, commitments of $200 billion annually by 2030 and $700 billion by 2050, and near-universal adoption from every UN member except the United States.

Will those commitments materialize? Probably not. The previous Aichi Biodiversity Targets (2010-2020) completely failed according to the UN's own assessment. But here's the thing: even assuming the GBF makes zero progress on its funding goals, the current biodiversity budget is already around $121 billion per year. The biodiversity finance gap is estimated at $598-824 billion annually, but even the status quo is serious money.

What Is That Money Actually Being Spent On?

Essentially, traditional nature conservation: creating protected areas (the "30x30" target of protecting 30% of land and sea by 2030), requiring corporate disclosure of biodiversity impacts, eliminating harmful subsidies, and so on.

Some of these interventions are necessary. Protected areas do prevent species from going extinct. You can't have tigers without tiger habitat. But many of these interventions have very limited evidence of effectiveness. Corporate disclosure requirements, for example, have almost no empirical support showing they actually reduce environmental harm. They're popular because they're seen as politically feasible, not because they work.

The Elephant in the Room Literally Nobody is Talking About: Beef

You know what would be an extremely good use of that money, probably by far the best use if the GBF really cared about was biodiversity?

Investing in cultivated meat technology.

I'm preaching to the choir on the EA Forum, I know. But I think even here the argument for cultivated meat is rarely made from the biodiversity perspective. And it's actually very obvious looking at the numbers. Livestock occupies 77% of global agricultural land. The FAO estimates 90% of worldwide deforestation is driven by livestock and agriculture. In the Brazilian Amazon specifically, 65-70% of deforestation comes from beef production alone.

The current GBF effectively accepts these drivers as inevitable. The economic incentives pushing landowners to clear forest for cattle aren't going away, and corporations confirming "yup, we chopped down some of the Amazon" isn't going to stop anything. Even if you're just a random conservationist at the GBF, and all you care about in this world is whether your pet-interest species of Amazonian tree frog continues to exist past 2100, then you should be howling for more investment in lab-grown beef.

The Absolutely Insane Funding Gap

There is nothing in the GBF about cultivated meat.

In 2024, global investment in cultivated meat was only $139 million, down 40% from the previous year, and the lowest annual total since 2019. The total ever invested in cultivated meat is around $3 billion.

Using just 1% of the current $121 billion yearly biodiversity budget—$1.2 billion—on cultivated meat investment, we could double the total cumulative investment in lab-grown meat in 3 years. The amount of money that goes to solving the beef problem, one of the main threats to biodiversity globally, is a rounding error compared to what the GBF commits to traditional conservation. The Good Food Institute's own analysis says that "private funding alone will be insufficient to fully fund first-of-a-kind cultivated meat facilities." If just a tiny amount of the GBF's funding went to cultivated meat, we could accelerate its timelines dramatically.

The Leverage Point We're Ignoring

The amount of money that governments commit to biodiversity through international frameworks is orders of magnitude larger than what private philanthropists can muster. When there are such obvious arguments for why that money should be going toward genuinely high-impact interventions, and when COPs are such an obvious leverage point to change the direction of that money, it seems clear that EA should be spending more time thinking about how to influence these summits.

The GBF is trying to eliminate $500 billion in harmful agricultural, mining, and fishing subsidies by 2050 and redirect them toward interventions that might help foster biodiversity. If redirecting just 5% of that $500 billion—$25 billion a year—toward R&D could accelerate cultivated beef price parity by even five years, this would likely be among the Framework's most cost-effective interventions by an order of magnitude. And this is just from a biodiversity perspective. It doesn't even take into account all the other co-benefits that EA tends to talk about: animal welfare, climate change, protein availability, pandemic risk reduction, antibiotic resistance, and so on. This money is just for biodiversity, but the pure biodiversity case is overwhelming on its own.

What Would EA Engagement Look Like?

I don't have all the answers here, but some possibilities:

1. Research: Actually model the cost-effectiveness of different GBF interventions. What's the expected biodiversity impact per dollar of protected area funding vs. cultivated meat R&D? Has anyone done this rigorously?
2. Advocacy: Get people with international policy expertise into the rooms where these decisions get made. The CBD COP meetings happen regularly. Who from the EA community is attending? Who's making the case for technology investment?
3. Coalition-building: The cultivated meat industry wants government funding. Biodiversity organizations want to stop deforestation. These interests align. Is anyone explicitly making this connection in policy spaces?
4. Targeted giving: If there are organizations working at this intersection—advocating for technology-forward biodiversity policy at the international level—they might be extremely cost-effective to fund.

EA has traditionally focused on charity evaluation, direct interventions, AI safety, and existential risks. In my experience, it does this with an entrepreneurial mindset, thinking of privately wealthy individuals and small, genius start-up teams first, and large bureaucracies second. And I get why. Large bureaucracies suck and, in general, a happy life is spent far away from them.

But the counterfactual impact of shifting even a small percentage of these enormous funding flows toward high-impact interventions could dwarf what we can achieve through traditional philanthropy. The global biodiversity budget is 1,000 times larger than GiveWell's annual directed giving. Even marginal influence over how that money gets spent could be transformative.

These conversations are happening anyway. The diplomats already have a say over where this money goes. The only question is whether EA is going to show up at the table.