This week’s United Nations climate change summit in Glasgow has so far yielded plenty of disappointing updates on global progress, many desperate pleas for action, and a firehose of new pledges and promises.
Yesterday, Jeff Bezos got in on the funding frenzy, sort of.
The Amazon founder and recent space traveler has dedicated $2 billion over 10 years from his Bezos Earth Fund to support land restoration and encourage greater sustainability in agricultural production and food consumption.
Given the long timeline, broad goals and relatively limited details, the announcement serves as much as a declaration of strategy as a pledge. It’s also part of his overall $10 billion pledge on climate change, so doesn’t represent a new pool of funding from Bezos. But it does offer some fresh insight into how the climate philanthropy of the world’s sometimes-richest person will look as he spends those billions by 2030.
“Our commitment today supports a three-fold imperative—we must conserve what we have, restore what we’ve lost, and grow what we need in harmony with nature,” said Bezos in the fund’s press release.
Bezos also announced this week he would contribute $500 million to a new joint effort, created by the Rockefeller and IKEA foundations, to help poor countries fund the transition to clean energy. Along with a $1 billion September pledge to support a goal of conserving 30% of the land’s surface by the end of the decade, the new announcements bring the Bezos Earth Fund’s public commitments to approximately $4.6 billion, though we only know of about $1 billion allocated to specific grantees at this point.
It’s an impressive sum, even if some of the pledges are spread over 10 years, and still pales in comparison to the level of funding that’s actually needed. It reinforces the 57-year-old’s status as the largest single donor to climate change, even as other billionaires join the fray, and signals a whole new category of potential grantees on the way.
At the same time, it’s always hard not to feel conflicted about Bezos’ climate funding, given the fact that he so vividly represents the gross inequality that feeds into and is exacerbated by climate change. Bezos is roughly $79 billion richer than when he started the Bezos Earth Fund. How much richer will he be when these funds are actually spent? As the fortunes of his peers on the Forbes 400 climb, why are there still so few billionaires joining Bezos in addressing the climate crisis? And how did we get to the point where some of the biggest news from the world’s signature climate gathering are private funding commitments? For now, let’s take a look at this pledge.
What we know about the $2 billion pledge
Half the pledged amount, or $1 billion, will go to landscape restoration. One segment of this funding will initially prioritize work in Africa to plant trees, revitalize grasslands and add trees to farmland. Another portion will focus on the United States, specifically landscapes key to carbon storage, biodiversity and local communities. In a sign of the fund’s continued attention to environmental justice, 40% of support will “directly engage or benefit” underserved communities.
“Africa is home to the world’s greatest restoration opportunity, with more than 700 million hectares of degraded land that can be restored,” said Dr. Ibrahim Mayaki, chief executive officer, African Union Development Agency-NEPAD, in the press release.
The other half of the pledge will go toward changing how the world grows and consumes food, though details on this initiative are even more limited. The fund hopes to increase crop yields while reducing agriculture’s footprint, encourage more people to switch to plant-based diets, improve agricultural supply chains, and reduce food loss and waste.
What we don’t know about the pledge
The growth and consumption of food is such a broad issue that each of the goals listed above could basically be an entire philanthropic program area. Encouraging plant-based diets, for example, is a completely different kind of work than increasing crop yields. So there are really endless directions this new pool of funding could go.
It’s also worth noting that some of these issues are minefields when it comes to philanthropy’s top-down tendencies and concerns about local sovereignty. The Gates Foundation has been working on increasing crop yields for several years now, and it’s one of its most controversial and criticized lines of funding (keep in mind this is a foundation that also works on vaccines). Will Bezos go the way of locally controlled agroecology or tech-fueled industrial ag? Perhaps both? To date, Bezos Earth Fund has supported both natural solutions and technological decarbonization of heavy industry.
There’s no indication of which organizations will receive this money. The announcement names only one partner: AFR100, the African Forest Landscape Initiative, a partnership of 31 governments on the continent to restore 100 million hectares by 2030. It does note the fund will work with other “Africa-owned” partners on landscape restoration, and a related Bezos-backed fund that supports AFR100 offers further hints. Such lack of detail is common in joint pledges, given that each signatory has its own grantees, but a bit more unusual in a solitary pledge.
It’s also not clear how much will flow directly to local organizations versus through U.S.-based or international partners. Much of the Bezos Earth Fund’s international funding to date has passed through large global green groups, such as World Wildlife Fund and The Nature Conservancy. While even their critics acknowledge these organizations do critical work, smaller groups have repeatedly argued for direct access to funding, instead of serving as sub-grantees. A spokesperson said the fund is not currently setting specific regional benchmarks.
As a new organization that is still rapidly hiring—its open positions outnumber listed staff—the fund will have to decide whether to prioritize getting funding out the door versus trying to establish the relationships and infrastructure needed to do direct funding. Its first round of funding balanced these priorities by making several major grants to environmental justice intermediary funds. Perhaps it will turn to regrantors in target regions to ensure dollars move quickly while being informed by local communities.
Aspects of Bezos Earth Fund remain a mystery
The Bezos Earth Fund has committed nearly half of its pledged billions, but basic details about how it operates remain unknown.
The legal structure of the fund is unclear. Bezos set up an LLC, Fellowship Ventures, that applied to trademark “Bezos Earth Fund” in July 2020, according to reporting for Recode by Theodore Schleifer. Using an LLC would fit with the modus operandi of other tech billionaire philanthropists like Mark Zuckerberg or Laurene Powell Jobs. But the fund has not confirmed if it is an LLC, foundation, or donor-advised fund (DAF).
The fund has also not indicated whether the $10 billion represents principal that was set aside and is gaining interest—like funds at many foundations or DAFs—or simply a total to be reached over 10 years, without considering inflation. Given recent market gains—with Amazon stock faring particularly well—the difference could number in the billions.
What’s next for the fund?
Close watchers of Bloomberg Technology got a sneak preview of the new grants when Bezos Earth Fund CEO Andrew Steer shared, almost word for word, the same “tri-fold” themes as Bezos in a video interview with the outlet in response to a question about the fund’s next steps and areas of interest.
His other comments, plus the long list of programs on the fund’s website, show the fund intends to spread its billions across a wide range of the transformations needed to reach a net-zero emissions future.
“We’re looking at the 40 to 50 revolutions that are required. We’re asking which 10 should we be in, and how should we engage in them—so that change becomes irresistible and unstoppable,” Steer told Bloomberg. “That’s the job of philanthropy. That’s the way we’re going about it.”