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?

1. ^{^}

    "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/ 

2. ^{^}

   "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/ 

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). 

1. ^{^}

   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

2. ^{^}

   Human population surpassed 7.3 billion in 2014: https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/world-population-by-year/ 

3. ^{^}

   https://www.nutritionix.com/i/nutritionix/fresh-sardine-1-medium-sardine-4/5b2a87a6caec4140766f457a 

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.

1. ^{^}

   Such as in this Claude Sonnet 4 chat

2. ^{^}

   https://ourworldindata.org/pollinator-dependence 

3. ^{^}

   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 

Ah yes, so I guess the comparison is roughly 1-1.2 trillion other insects yearly (2020), versus 4.2-14.4 trillion honeybees yearly (2017). So, 7-29% as many as the number of honeybees. 

(Multiplying 1.4-4.8 trillion honeybees alive at one time by 3 to get the annual number, because of the 4 month average lifespan). 

The link (which does work for me, perhaps try another browser) is to an archive of a 2018 article by Jiwoon Hwang which has a table with numbers of different animals, and states "1 trillion animals exist due to humans, 97% attributable to honey". As Bentham's Bulldog and the link itself caveats, this is not true, simply because the table does not include any other farmed insects. There were 1-1.2 trillion insects farmed to be eaten by humans or animals in 2020, plus many more silkworms and cochineals. @Jason Schukraft  estimated  "that at any given time in 2017 there were between 1.4 and 4.8 trillion adult managed honey bees", for comparison. Below is the calculation from Jiwoon Hwang:

Data for honey bees:
FAOSTAT, Livestock Primary, World, Production Quantity, Honey, natural, 2014 (http://www.fao.org/faostat/en/#data/QL) : 1,510,566 tonnes

“How much honey does the average worker honey bee make in her lifetime? – 1/12 teaspoon.” (https://www.honey.com/newsroom/press-kits/honey-trivia)

Density of Honey: 1.36 kg/l (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honey#Nutritional_and_sugar_profile)

Estimated average lifespan of honey bees: 4 months (25-35 days summer, 6-8 months winter)
(Amdam, Gro Vang, and Stig W. Omholt. “The regulatory anatomy of honeybee lifespan.” Journal of Theoretical Biology 216.2 (2002): 209.)

Calculation:
World Honey Production 2014: 1,510,566,000,000 grammes. (1,510,566 tonnes * 1000 * 1000)
One teaspoon: 5mL (metric, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teaspoon#Metric_teaspoon)
One teaspoon of honey: 6.8 gramme (5mL * 1.36 kg/L)
Honey per honey bee: 0.56666666666667 gramme (6.8 gramme * (1/12))
Honey lifetimes per year: 2,665,704,705,882 (1,510,566,000,000/0.56666666666667)
Honey years per year: 888,568,235,294 (2,665,704,705,882 * (4/12))

Edit: note that the 97% number also doesn't include shrimp.