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Jeff Bezos speaks at the Climate Week NYC Leaders' Reception.
The Bezos Earth Fund has images.
Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, announced on Monday that his Earth Fund would be giving away $443 million to help land conservants and reduce environmental burdens on marginalized communities.
More than $3 billion has been pledged by the fund this year. In 2020, Bezos promised to give $10 billion to tackle climate change, which would be about 5 percent of his current net worth.
The Bezos Earth Fund has faced criticism from the beginning.
Some grassroots environmental groups have criticized the Bezos Earth Fund from the beginning. Critics pointed out that Bezos initially funded big-name environmental groups with historically white leadership and comparatively large budgets rather than supporting more Indigenous and people of color-led community groups. Amazon, founded by Bezos, continues to emit greenhouse gases and is being criticized for it.
Environmental justice, a movement to stop pollution and environmental degradation from disproportionately harming low-income neighborhoods, communities of color, and other vulnerable groups, has become a bigger part of the Bezos Earth Fund's messaging. The fund has set aside $130 million for 19 different organizations to do critical climate justice work. It is the second $150 million pledged to climate justice groups in September.
The latest funding for environmental justice is intended to support the Justice40 Initiative. Biden created the initiative after taking office in January to make sure that disadvantaged communities receive 40 percent of the benefits of federal investments in clean energy and climate action.
A wide range of groups that gather data to inform policymaking, help underserved communities become more resilient to climate change, support tribes and Native communities, or plan to create training programs for the Justice40 initiative are some of the groups that Bezos' grantees include. GRID Alternatives, a nonprofit that works to increase access to solar power, will get $12 million for its Tribal Solar Accelerator Fund.
The international initiative to conserve 30 percent of Earth's lands and oceans will receive $261 million in the latest funding announcement. The focus will be on creating, expanding, and monitoring protected areas in the tropics. The grants will create 11 million hectares of new protected areas in the Congo Basin, where 70% of Africa's forests are located. The grants will convert an estimated 48 million hectares into protected areas in the Tropical Andes, an important carbon sink for the planet.
Creating, expanding, and monitoring protected areas.
The fight against climate change is dependent on forests and other ecosystems trapping and storing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. New protected areas can harm local communities. There is a history of Indigenous peoples being forced off their lands to create national parks. The World Wildlife Fund was accused of failing to take responsibility for human rights abuses during a US Congressional hearing. An investigation by Buzzfeed News found that WWF-funded park rangers had been accused of murder, torture, and rape.
The Bezos Earth Fund says that the newly protected areas will help local communities. It is spending an additional $25 million to kick off a new kind of global mechanism that could secure support for Indigenous peoples and local communities. Research shows that forests fare better under their care. The US and Africa have more money to restore landscapes.
A recent report implicated Amazon in playing an "outsized" role in port congestion and related shipping pollution along the west coast of the US. The company's carbon footprint grew by nearly 20 percent despite its commitments to address climate change.
