What we know about the Bezos Earth Fund

In the two years since its founding, the Bezos Earth Fund has developed a philanthropic strategy that relies on partnering with other foundations and key donors — including governments and corporations — to tackle what it believes are some of the biggest and most underfunded issues within climate change. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos announced plans to launch the initiative in 2020 with an initial pledge of $10 billion over 10 years. At the time, he called climate change “the biggest threat to our planet.” “I want to work alongside others both to amplify known ways and to explore new ways of fighting the devastating impact of climate change on the planet we all share,” he wrote in an Instagram post. Specifically, he said he wanted to fund scientists, activists, non-governmental organizations, and “any effort that offers a real possibility to help preserve and protect the natural world.” So far, that has entailed focusing on areas such as forest and biodiversity preservation in the Tropical Andes and Africa. Today, the fund is one of few philanthropic organizations focused explicitly on climate change. Others, such as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, are taking steps to integrate climate into their existing priorities, such as agricultural development, to help meet the ambitious goals of the Paris Climate Agreement by 2030. Still, climate change mitigation funding is less than 2% of all annual global giving, according to data from the ClimateWorks Foundation, a nonprofit research organization and Earth Fund grantee. That leaves plenty of room for Bezos, who currently has an estimated net worth of $120 billion, to become a pioneering force in the area, if he chooses. At last year’s United Nations Climate Change Conference in Glasgow, or COP 26, the fund committed $3 billion to “support nature” in this decade with a focus on carbon- and biodiversity-rich areas in Africa and South America. Conservation, restoration, and food systems are each expected to receive $1 billion each under the pledge. Bezos Earth Fund CEO Andrew Steer told Devex during this year’s COP 27 that the organization eventually wants to spend about $1 billion a year. It has spent about $1.6 billion over the past two years, he said. Here’s what else we know about the Earth Fund so far: Structure The Earth Fund currently has 25 full-time staff members and eight fellows who “bring cutting edge technical expertise to our work,” a spokesperson told Devex. The organization expects to have about 50-60 staff members by next year but doesn’t plan to have a large team, the spokesperson said. The organization divides its work into the following categories: • Conserving and restoring nature. • The future of food. • Environmental justice. • Decarbonizing energy, and industry. • Economics, finance, and markets. • Next technologies. • Monitoring, data, and accountability. The team works to identify where the organization can “strategically” invest in programs that will create “catalytic change in how we live and protect our planet,” the spokesperson said. As part of that effort, the organization monitors 50 “transition” areas where it wants to see climate action, including phasing out internal combustion engines and decarbonizing steel and cement. Bezos serves as the executive chair, and his partner Lauren Sánchez is vice chair. The two are “actively engaged” in the organization’s operations, the spokesperson said. Earlier this year, they traveled to Colombia to “advance our work in the Tropical Andes,” the spokesperson said. Bezos and Sánchez also have made work in Africa a major priority. The pair traveled to Gabon in July where they met with political leaders, local groups, and grantee partners in the Congo Basin to discuss “how we create and sustain protected areas while supporting the livelihoods of the 75 million people who call the area home,” according to the spokesperson. Earlier this month, the Earth Fund also announced that $50 million of the $1 billion pledge it made at COP 26 would be allocated to African restoration projects in the Rusizi Basin region that is part of the larger Congo Basin ecosystem and in Kenya’s Great Rift Valley. Grants One of the first things Bezos did upon founding the organization was to call CEOs of environmental institutions for ideas to “honor the fact that these are truly urgent times,” Steer said at last week’s Devex@COP27 event. Steer, who was then head of the World Resources Institute, said he was part of those conversations. Steer joined the Earth Fund in April of 2021. WRI received a five-year, $100 million grant from Bezos in 2020. “We were really grateful for that,” Steer said, adding that part of the funding went to a program that used satellite technology to track forest growth and land use to provide carbon data. The Earth Fund also partnered with WRI and others to create the Systems Change Lab data platform to track global progress on limiting global warming and biodiversity loss. The ClimateWorks Foundation was another early grant recipient. It devoted its $50 million grant “to drive climate action in the transportation and industrial sectors,” which it noted generates half of global greenhouse gas emissions. The organization recently launched a fund to help low- and middle-income countries transition away from fossil-fueled vehicles. Late last year, the Earth Fund also announced $443 million in grants to climate and environmental groups working in Africa, South America, and the United States. Those included $261 million for the 30x30 initiative started by the National Geographic Society and the Wyss Foundation, which aims to conserve 30% of the world’s land and oceans by 2030 “with a focus on the Congo Basin and Tropical Andes,” according to a press statement. Partnerships Partnerships have played a key role in the Earth Fund’s work over the past two years. It was one of several major foundations that recently joined a coalition with the United States government, major corporations, and other philanthropies seeking to attract $100 billion in corporate financing for the shift from fossil fuels to clean energy. The coalition was announced last week during the COP 27 in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt. It also was announced at COP 27 that the Earth Fund would help fund a satellite-data system the U.N. is developing to track methane emissions that contribute to global warming. The Methane Alert Response System, also called MARS, “is intended to help companies act on major emission sources,” and provide transparent and independent data. The fund also joined the IKEA Foundation and The Rockefeller Foundation to launch the Global Energy Alliance for People and Planet at COP 26. The coalition is working with multilateral development banks, governments and corporations to unlock $100 billion in public and private capital for renewable energy projects in the global south over the next decade. It has launched projects in at least 12 countries, including Ethiopia and Malawi, with plans to expand to at least seven more next year. Additionally, the Bezos Earth Fund belongs to an alliance of philanthropic organizations that have committed to spending $5 billion over 10 years to support the 30x30 conservation initiative. Part of that funding has been directed toward a separate $1.7 billion pledge by foundations and governments pledge to support Indigenous and local communities to address climate change. However, a recent report found that, so far, very little of the Indigenous pledge had actually gone directly to Indigenous- or locally-led nonprofit organizations. The strategy moving forward In October, Bezos was awarded the Galileo Foundation’s first Prophets of Philanthropy award, along with World Central Kitchen founder José Andrés, at the Vatican. In his acceptance speech, Bezos indicated many areas he felt deserving of more attention. “As we all know, in 2015, the world agreed to 17 Sustainable Development Goals for 2030. We gave ourselves 15 years. One would hope that we would find ourselves on track. Unfortunately, we are falling short on almost every goal,” he said. He also said rising costs of food, fuel, and fertilizer threatened to “push another 100 million people below the poverty line.” One of the ways to resolve such overwhelming issues is “fixing problems at the root” and creating “pre-conditions” for permanent change. However, Bezos has faced heavy criticism over the years for not using more of his money for philanthropy and addressing global crises. Prior to launching the Earth Fund, Bezos’ biggest donation was a $2 billion effort to build a network of Montessori preschools launched with his then-wife MacKenzie Scott, according to The New York Times. And nowadays, he is often compared to Scott, who is now a billionaire in her own right. Scott has signed The Giving Pledge and has so far given away more than $14 billion following their 2019 divorce. Bezos recently told CNN that he would give away the bulk of his multi-billion dollar fortune in his lifetime, but provided no specifics on how he plans to do that. Further, he still hasn’t joined the more than 230 other billionaires who have vowed to give away most of their fortunes in their lifetimes or upon their deaths as part of The Giving Pledge initiative launched by Bill Gates, Melinda French Gates, and Warren Buffett. “A lot of people will be paying attention to how he’s building this capacity that he mentioned in terms of getting ready to give away his money,” Amir Pasic, dean of Indiana University’s Lilly Family School of Philanthropy, told Barron’s this week. A spokesperson for the Earth Fund declined to say whether Bezos was expected to allocate more of his wealth to the organization, in light of his announcement to CNN. However, the Fund did note that his initial $10 billion pledge to the organization was the “largest philanthropic commitment ever to fight climate change and protect nature.” “It’s exciting to see that global leaders in the corporate sector, like Jeff, are increasingly becoming global leaders in the public sphere, helping change the world,” the spokesperson said. “They not only give money but use their platform too.” Clearer at the moment is the direction in which Steer would like to see the Earth Fund move. Often philanthropy is looked at as the “rich uncle” that will give money if smiled at and slapped on the back but “we have sharp pencils too,” he said. “Let’s move away from assuming that government to government is the solution,” or “just NGOs,” Steer said. “We need a much more multistakeholder sort of approach.” Specifically, he said he’d like to see more leveraging of philanthropic funding to attract further investments in green projects. “It’s easy to spend money. It’s difficult to spend money well,” he said, before adding that he’d like to see philanthropic funding better “leveraged” to attract other funders to projects. He noted that the fund has made $300 million in funding available to U.S.-based environmental justice groups to help them build capacity and ensure federal investments reach disadvantaged communities. The grants will help the organizations build the capacity needed for them to “pull” those government resources into their communities, he said. The fund is “thinking about how we can be the most helpful given our size and focus” and “examining how we can best leverage funding to make our dollars go even farther and perhaps do things a bit differently,” the spokesperson said. The organization’s work in the Congo Basin and Tropical Andes is a “good example” of its strategy for distributing funding to multiple NGOs rather than just one to form a team focused on several areas, the spokesperson added. “We want to make the whole add up to more than the sum of its parts,” the spokesperson said. “We are building an inspiring team of thought leaders, problem solvers, and doers from scientific, government, private, and nonprofit backgrounds, all working to deliver transformational change in these critical times.”