Our Research Key Focuses:
- Longtermism
Definition: Strategic decision making on timescales out hundreds to thousands of years.
Description: Planning for the longterm future, which involves trying to ensure interventions will cause impacts beyond hundreds of years. We will consider our rare leverage and unique advantages to act early and change the course of events. Longterm decision making also takes into account unborn people’s needs and desires across many diverse cultures, as well as anticipates changing technological abilities and other geographic and political changes. We will have to grapple with changing valuescapes. Longterm strategy is about ensuring futures which we have reason to expect both we and the future will desire.
- Tree of Life Preservation
Definition: Preserving the greatest portion of the tree of life.
Description: Prioritize preventing extinction in species which are genetically distant from other species. Prioritize projects which will make the greatest difference for the greatest number of species spread widely across the tree of life. Avoid bias towards “charismatic” species like local mammals. This can be quantified using Evolutionary Distinctiveness via genetic uniqueness metrics.
- Resilience/Ecosystem Collapse Prevention
Definition: Ecosystems’ ability to self-repair & preventing the degradation of ecosystems.
Description: Anticipate which ecosystems are at risk of collapse and intervene. Especially when collapses would be difficult if not impossible to reverse. Ecosystem change is natural, but ecosystem change towards reduced flourishing of life, ecosystem services, stability, and other desirable characteristics should be opposed. This will require greater understanding of ecosystems functioning and how to successfully intervene.
The Roots of This Project
It started when Tandena Wagner, Eileen Walz & Iska Knuuttila began writing a forum post on ‘Resilience & Biodiversity’ over the summer of 2022 as an entry for Open Philanthropy’s Cause Prioritization Contest. By beginning to explore this topic, we felt a need to deepen the conversation with others drawn to exploring the flourishing of life on Earth. Since then we've been welcoming others interested in joining our group.
In 2024 we contracted for another organization to review a grant. We have also been publishing articles, hosting workshops, giving talks, and attending conferences. We will update material later on this website.
Identifying 10-20 Top Interventions for Further Research
Starting with every intervention we can think of, we are narrowing down the list to the most promising interventions before doing shallow dives on each. Afterwards we will find actors applying these interventions, and apply the formula for biodiversity, ecosystem flourishing, and longterm timelines to each project. In the future we hope to offer some well-founded donation recommendations to altruists who share these values.
EcoResilienceInitiative@gmail.com