The Bezos Earth Fund has committed $110 million in grant funding to organizations developing climate research and working to restore deforested and degraded land within the African continent and in the United States.
The new grants are part of the 10-year, $10 billion pledge Amazon founder Jeff Bezos made when he launched the Earth Fund in 2020. The organization said in a statement on Wednesday that this latest batch of funding continues its commitment to “fight climate change, conserve and restore nature, and advance environmental justice and economic opportunity.”
The $110 million pledge includes a $50 million allocation for African restoration projects that the Bezos Earth Fund revealed at last month’s 27th United Nations Climate Change Conference in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt. The funding will help support AFR100, a country-led African initiative that wants to restore 100 million hectares (about 250 million acres) of land by 2030. One Tree Planted, One Acre Fund, World Resources Institute, and Realize Impact will receive $27.2 million of the total for their restoration work in the Greater Rusizi Basin region of the larger Congo basin and in Kenya’s Great Rift Valley.
Other funding will be distributed as grants and loans to small businesses and community projects to support restoration efforts and help them scale up, according to the Bezos Earth Fund.
Working with local groups is “central to achieving global restoration goals,” Andrew Steer, the organization’s president and CEO, said in the statement. Work with AFR100, in particular, is focused on removing “three critical barriers to locally led restoration.”
“First, we must build capacity, drawing on the expertise that exists within African institutions and beyond to help restoration projects scale. Second, we must ensure that finance is intermediated more effectively to reach frontline groups. Finally, we must ensure that best in-class monitoring systems are used to track progress on the ground,” he said.
The Bezos Earth Fund will also provide $30 million to the U.S.-based National Fish and Wildlife Foundation to restore land and forests in the U.S. in collaboration with conservation groups, nonprofits, and Indigenous groups.
The other major commitments include a $10 million pledge to support groups developing research and tools to show the links between human activities and extreme weather events. Another $11 million will go toward two initiatives that provide some governance models and best practices for voluntary carbon markets: The Integrity Council for the Voluntary Carbon Market and the Voluntary Carbon Market Integrity Initiative.
A full list of all the grantees can be found here.
As Devex previously reported, the Bezos Earth Fund has developed a philanthropic strategy over the past two years that relies on partnering with other groups to tackle climate change issues. The organization recently updated its website — which had been rather scant — with new details about how it organizes its work, as well as information about its growing staff.
About the author
Stephanie Beasley@Steph_Beasley
Stephanie Beasley is a Senior Reporter at Devex, where she covers global philanthropy with a focus on regulations and policy. She is an alumna of the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism and Oberlin College and has a background in Latin American studies. She previously covered transportation security at POLITICO.
