The map, on one page
Rees Calder · 18 April 2026 · 5 min read
If you've ever tried to work out "where should my effort actually go" and lost an afternoon to it, you're in good company. The space is enormous, the advice is noisy, and the map nobody gives you is the one you actually need.
Here is one version of that map. It will be wrong in parts. Good maps usually are. Corrections welcome.
The rough territory
Almost every argument about where impact lives resolves to a choice along three axes.
Scale: how many does it help? A local intervention might help dozens. A global health intervention might help millions. A policy intervention that shifts a country's regulation might help tens of millions. A research breakthrough in a neglected field might help billions across a century.
Tractability: how much does money move the needle? Some problems are bottlenecked by cash. Some by talent. Some by political will. Pouring money into a talent-constrained problem is mostly wasted. Pouring money into a cash-constrained problem with a credible team is where impact concentrates.
Neglectedness: is anyone else already on it? A problem with 10,000 organisations working on it and $50B in annual funding has diminishing returns on your marginal dollar. A problem with three organisations and $10M probably doesn't.
This is the standard EA framework, usually called ITN (Importance, Tractability, Neglectedness). It's a decent first filter. It doesn't tell you what to do, but it tells you which questions are worth asking.
The rough landscape, in 2026
Six areas where impact seems to concentrate, ordered roughly by consensus-weight of evidence. Not a complete list. Not a ranking of moral importance. Just the places where the combination of scale, tractability and neglectedness currently favours marginal effort.
One: Global health and development at the median-cost end. Malaria nets, deworming, vaccines, cash transfers, maternal health in low-income countries. Cost per life saved or DALY averted is well-measured. Scale is enormous (billions of people). Tractability is strong (direct cash works). Neglectedness is moderate (well-funded but still materially under-resourced). GiveWell's top charities live here.
Two: Animal welfare, particularly factory farming reform. Tens of billions of animals a year in industrial conditions. Corporate campaigns to remove cages, regulate worst practices, and shift consumption have shown compounding returns per dollar. Animal Charity Evaluators and The Humane League sit here. Neglectedness is high (relative to the scale of suffering).
Three: Biosecurity and pandemic preparedness. The next pandemic is not a question of whether but when. Between COVID's $16T+ global economic cost and growing lab-leak surface area, marginal prevention work has very high expected value. Neglected relative to the stakes, though getting less so.
Four: AI safety and governance. Large uncertainty, large potential impact, fast timelines. Splits into technical alignment research (how do we make advanced systems do what we want) and governance (how do humans and institutions handle the transition). Not consensus-validated the way malaria is, but many smart people allocate here on expected-value grounds.
Five: Climate change, particularly on the policy and breakthrough-energy end. Individual behaviour is a rounding error. Policy changes and technological breakthroughs are the lever. Giving to campaigns that accelerate clean-energy deployment at scale, or to research in neglected clean-tech areas, outperforms most behavioural giving by several orders of magnitude.
Six: Long-term institutional improvement. Education reform in neglected contexts, democratic-institution strengthening in fragile states, mental health at scale, science-funding reform. Slower-moving but potentially very high leverage. Higher uncertainty per dollar.
What this map doesn't say
This map does not say which one is the most important. That's partly a values question (how much do you weight future generations, or non-human animals, or local vs global beneficiaries), partly an epistemic question (how much uncertainty you can tolerate for how much potential upside), and partly a personal-fit question (what are you actually good at, and where will your effort be useful rather than theoretically so).
If you're trying to give money well and don't have a strong personal tilt, global health at the median-cost end is probably the best default. It's where the evidence is thickest, the cost-effectiveness well-bounded, and the moral framing widely shared. You can do worse than funding AMF or Malaria Consortium and moving on with your life.
If you're choosing where to deploy your career, the map is different. Career leverage flows from fit. A skilled policy operator in biosecurity is worth more than a skilled policy operator dragooned into global health. Pick the area where your skills actually compound.
If you're trying to do both, accept that "optimal" doesn't exist and "better than last year" is a great target.
The next level down
Each of the six areas above breaks into a map of its own. Each sub-map has a different evidence picture, a different funder ecosystem, a different bottleneck. None of this is a substitute for reading more about whichever one pulls at you. It's a substitute for the more common experience of getting paralysed by the impossibility of choosing.
Pick one square on the map. Start there. You can always move.
Sources used: 80,000 Hours Problem Profiles (2020-2024), Open Philanthropy Focus Areas (2023), GiveWell Cost-Effectiveness Analysis (2024), Animal Charity Evaluators (2024), Rethink Priorities cause-prioritisation work (2023). Full links in the planning doc.