EA - Shallow Problem Review of Landmines and Unexploded Ordnance by Jakob P.

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Shallow Problem Review of Landmines and Unexploded Ordnance, published by Jakob P. on March 3, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.This report is a shallow dive into unexploded ordnance (UXO), landmines which is a sub-area within Global Health and Development. This report reflects approximately 40-50 hours of research and is informed by a 6-month internship I did with the programme and donor relations section of the United Nations Mine Action Service in the fall of 2021. The report offers a brief dive into whether we think a particular problem area is a promising area for either funders or founders to be working in. Being a shallow report, should be used to decide whether or not more research and work into a particular problem area should be prioritised. This report was produced as part of Cause Innovation Bootcamp’s fellowship program. Thank you to James Snowden, Akhil Bansal and Leonie Falk for providing feedback on earlier versions of this report. All errors are my own.SummaryImportance: The issue of UXOs and landmines impacts the health as well as income and most likely the mental health of individuals.. There are on average ~25,000 casualties (defined as severely injured or dead) from landmines, IEDs and UXOs per year (with 2/3rds being caused by IEDs). To put provide some context for this number, Malaria, one of the leading global killers, caused 643 000 deaths (95% UI 302 000–1 150 000) in 2019. This report aims to gauge the income, health and psychological effects of those casualty events.Tractability: Mine action is the umbrella term capturing all the activities aimed at addressing the problem of victim operated landmines, IEDs and other UXOs - meaning that the detonation is triggered by the victim itself. There are several interventions in mine action with four phases to tackle the problem: prevention, avoidance, demining, and victim assistance. Although the report attempts to provide some data on the cost-effectiveness of the different interventions there are several reasons why these estimates are highly uncertain. Furthermore, it is unclear if it would be possible to scale the most cost-effective interventions while keeping the level of cost-effectiveness.Neglectedness: The United Nations Mine Action service functions as the coordinating body for a lot of the funding and efforts in international mine action and moves around 65 million USD. The two biggest implementers are the Mines Advisory Group (90 million USD) and the HALO Trust (100 million USD). Most of that funding comes from high income country governments. These grants often include a political component in where the activities are taking place. It is unclear how effectively these resources are allocated and how many casualties they are preventing each year.Main TakeawaysBiggest uncertainties:The poor data availability allows for only low levels of confidence in many conclusions.It is highly uncertain what the economic effects of landmines contamination actually are. Since we would expect that these effects make up a majority of the positive benefit, our cost-effectiveness estimates are highly uncertain.Recommendations for philanthropist and why:The research has led to the recommendation to inquire directly with mine action organisations on what they deem the most cost-effective area or intervention to fund, since such data is highly dependent on the factors which cannot easily be predicted.Ukraine is being heavily contaminated by unexploded ordnance right now, especially in its east, the severity and need of the contamination will require a lot of funding and could be potentially very cost effective due to the dense nature of the contaminants as well as the terrain. Mechanical demining could be an appropriate method which could be highly cost-effective. The wide scale decontaminatio...