Amazon founder Jeff Bezos announced the latest round of Earth Fund grants, worth $443 million, which will be spent primarily on land conservation and restoration and efforts to reduce environmental burdens on marginalized communities.
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This year, the fund has committed more than $3 billion to similar initiatives. In 2020, Bezos pledged to commit $10 billion to tackling climate change this decade.
Initially, Bezos primarily funded big-brand environmental groups and comparatively large budgets rather than supporting more indigenous and people of color community groups, his critics pointed out. Other criticisms focused on how Amazon continues to pollute neighborhoods and emit increasing levels of greenhouse gases.
Since that early backlash, environmental justice, a movement to stop pollution and environmental degradation, has become a bigger part of the Bezos Earth Fund’s work. The latest funding round provides $130 million to 19 different organizations doing “critical work for climate justice.”.
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The $130 million for environmental justice in this latest funding round is intended to support the Justice40 . Shortly after taking office in January, Biden created the initiative through an executive order to ensure that “disadvantaged communities” receive 40% of the “total benefits” of federal investments in clean energy and climate action.
The latest funding announcement also includes $261 million allocated to an international initiative to conserve 30 percent of the Earth’s land and oceans by 2030. It will focus on creating, expanding, and monitoring so-called “protected areas.” According to the Bezos Earth Fund, the grants will create 11 million hectares of newly protected areas in the Congo Basin, home to 70 percent of Africa’s forests. In the Tropical Andes, another major carbon sink for the planet, the grants will convert about 48 million hectares into protected areas.
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The Bezos Earth Fund says the newly protected areas will help “secure” the rights of local communities across 24 million hectares of land. It is also spending an additional $25 million to launch a new kind of “global mechanism” that could secure “support” for indigenous peoples and local communities. Forests tend to do better under their care, research. There is also an additional $51 million for landscape restoration in the US and Africa.
