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This spreadsheet is part of ACE's 2024 evaluation of Aquatic Life Institute. It includes our cost-effectiveness analysis (CEA) of three of their programs. Given the important limitations of these analyses, we advise caution when interpreting the data. If readers have any questions or comments, please contact ACE's Charity Evaluations Manager, Vincent Mak: vincent.mak@animalcharityevaluators.org

We aimed to estimate Suffering-Adjusted Days (SADs) per dollar for all our cost-effectiveness assessments. To do this, we used Ambitious Impact’s new internal SADs system for making quantitative decisions on animal welfare ideas. This roughly represents the number of days of intense pain felt by each animal. It is essentially a measure of days in pain with various adjustments for:
- Intensity of pain
- Sentience
- Welfare range (i.e., their relative capacity to experience pain and pleasure, in accordance with Rethink Priorities’ ‘Welfare Ranges’ report)

SADs are adjusted to “disabling” levels of pain on the Welfare Footprint pain scale, so one day spent in disabling pain for one human would be equal to one SAD.

This cost effectiveness analysis involved various degrees of speculation on the part of our team. Where we felt we could make reasonable and justifiable guesses, we included them in our analysis. Where we felt we were making less justifiable guesses that would have resulted in wildly different outputs, we did not include them and did not continue trying to estimate SADs per dollar as the final unit of our analysis. The reason for taking this approach is that one of ACE’s guiding principles is ​​to follow a rigorous process and use logical reasoning and empirical evidence to make decisions, so while in some circumstances it can be a useful thought experiment to make guesses, we were unwilling to base our assessment of charities on cost-effectiveness analyses that were so highly speculative.

We attempted to independently verify many of the values in this spreadsheet, especially when estimates were provided by the charity. Where it felt reasonable to do so, in cases where we sourced differing opinions on values we opted to adjust the value to fall between the upper and lower values we sourced.

For the first program we assessed, Corporate and Institutional Outreach, we were able to estimate the SADs averted per dollar. However, there are several limitations that need to be kept in mind when reading this estimate. We were only able to include electrical stunning of shrimp as a quantified welfare improvement, despite ALI working on several other changes, such as environmental enrichment for shrimps and finfishes. This is because of a lack of existing scientific evidence about the impact of these welfare improvements on animals and the details of their specific implementation. We would expect these improvements to add to the impact that has been quantified. Our estimate is further limited by the lack of clear scientific evidence surrounding shrimp sentience, and the uncertainty around the expected length of impact of the welfare improvements. For the second program, policy feedback for farmed fishes and wild-caught fishes, we did not continue with our analysis beyond estimating the cost of an average policy engagement. This is because most of the policy feedback provided is not yet part of an implemented policy, which limits our ability to estimate its direct impact on animals.

Finally, because the SADs system has been recently created and has its own internal limitations, it's likely that data will be updated soon. Thus, we advise readers to be cautious about taking these values as rigid estimates.

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Note: ACE has updated our SADs values since this evaluation. These spreadsheets retain the original values used at the time of assessment, and our opinion is that the updates don't warrant changes to charities' recommendation status.
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