OVERVIEW: The Bezos Earth Fund is the climate funder created by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. It supports a broad range of climate change, clean energy and environmental initiatives globally.
IP TAKE: The Bezos Earth Fund is “focused on harnessing the best available science and assessing political, economic, social, and technological factors to identify barriers and opportunities where our support will have maximum impact.” With its $10 billion commitment to fighting climate change, this funder has, in just a few short years, supported some of the worlds largest conservation projects and most promising research and technology for climate change mitigation. A healthy portion of funding has also gone to community and Indigenous-led projects.
The Fund does not run an open application program or provide a direct way of getting in touch; it appears to conduct its own research to both locate and generate important projects for funding. However, its Our People page features the names and short bios of team members. If you feel your organization is a good fit, it may be worthwhile to reach out via LinkedIn or other social media channels.
PROFILE: Established in early 2020 with a $10 billion pledge to combat climate change, the Bezos Earth Fund was created by Jeff Bezos to address what he has called, “the biggest threat to our planet.” The Fund’s aim is to “to harness the best of human ingenuity, adaptability, and collective action to create a future in which everyone can thrive.” Its grantmaking programs are Conserving & Restoring Nature; Future of Food; Environmental Justice; Decarbonizing Energy & Industry; Economics, Finance & Markets; Next Technologies; and Monitoring, Data & Accountability. Grantmaking is global in scope.
Grants for Climate Change and Clean Energy
Climate change and clean energy constitute Bezos’s largest giving area. Grantmaking stems from five of the Fund’s grantmaking programs:
Grants for Environmental Justice support “frontline communities” that “experience the first and worst effects of climate change.” In the U.S., the Fund has “ committed over $400 million to environmental justice groups” focusing on underserved areas, marginalized communities and underfunded climate issues. A subinitative, Greening America’s Cities, plans to distribute about $50 million a year in grants to to community and grassroots groups “devising urban greening solutions.” Early grantmaking for this initiative will focus on programs and projects in Albuquerque, Atlanta, Chicago, Los Angeles and Wilmington, Delaware, but the Fund expects to add more cities to this roster in the coming years.
Greening America’s Cities grants have supported organizations including the national organization GreenLatinos, Delaware’s New Castle Prevention Coalition and Green Cities California. Other U.S. Environmental Justice grantees include Gulf South for a Green New Deal, which works “to advance a just transition towards local sustainable economies” in states along the Gulf Coast, and Native Movement, an Alaska-based organization that pursues “community-driven solutions; from micro-grid renewable energy technologies to clean water and food security projects.”
According to its website, the fund has also “convened a coalition of philanthropists who have committed $1.7 billion to support Indigenous People in tropical forest areas.” Support has been channeled to organizations including Conserva Aves Partners, the Wildlife Conservation Society, Conservation International and Nia Tero, which works with Indigenous-led groups to protect “4.2 million hectares of Indigenous territories in Colombia, Ecuador and Peru.”
Decarbonizing Energy & Industry grants support “innovative solutions to help decarbonize the economy” with the overarching goal of “spurring just and equitable systems transformations, accelerating decarbonization across key emitting sectors and geographies.”
One of this program’s largest commitments to date is a collaboration through which the Environmental Defense Fund, the government of New Zealand, the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory and Harvard University work to “identify methane pollution, hold those responsible accountable and highlight opportunities to manage and minimize oil and gas methane emissions.”
U.S. grantees of this program include the Energy Foundation, the Greenling Institute and the Union of Concerned Scientists. Grantees working globally include the ClimateWorks Foundation, the Global Maritime Forum and the Global Energy Alliance for People and Planet.
Bezos’s Economics, Finance & Markets program seeks to “to accelerate changes in goods and financial markets to create a virtuous cycle of investment, prosperity, jobs, innovation, emission reductions, and ecosystem protection.”
One grant went to the Mission Impossible Partnership, through which the World Economic Forum, the Rocky Mountain Institute and other organizations worked to effect “transformational change in the world's most carbon intensive industries, including steel, aluminum, concrete, chemicals, aviation, shipping, and trucking.” Another grant supported a collaboration between Ceres and the Investor Network on Climate Risk and Sustainability to “accelerate progress among US financial regulators as they address climate as a systemic risk.”
Grants from the Next Technologies program “advance promising new technologies that will reduce emissions, remove carbon, and protect our natural systems.” Breakthrough Energy received funding for its efforts to advocate for and scale promising new clean energy technologies. Another grantee, the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, used funding for research on how the “carbon-storing ability of plants” may be enhanced and used to capture carbon.
Finally, through its Monitoring, Data & Accountability grantmaking program, the Fund “invests in creating world-class data and science to inform priorities, track progress, and hold actors accountable to their promises.” Funding focuses on technologies for measuring and analyzing data related to “environmental challenges,” as well as initiatives that support “transparency and accountability for governments, companies, and the financial sector.”
One grant from this program supported the University of Maryland School of Public Health’s Health’s Community Engagement, Environmental Justice, and Health Group, which used funding to support research on community-led air pollution measurement and monitoring in the Mid-Atlantic region. Other grantees include the Yale Program on Climate Change, Earthrise Media and the Massive Data Institute at Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy.
Grants for Environment, Marine and Freshwater Conservation, Animals and Wildlife
Bezos’s Conserving & Restoring Nature initiative is a $2 billion commitment to “conserve what we have, restore what we've lost, and grow what we need in harmony with nature.” The program organizes grantmaking into conservation and restoration initiatives and names geographic priorities including Sub-Saharan Africa, the Brazilian Amazon, the Congo Basin, the Pacific Ocean, the Tropical Andes and the United States.
Conservation grants target “solutions designed to help conserve nature and biodiversity based on science and data, working with local communities and Indigenous Peoples.” In addition to land and water conservation, funding supports “gene banks that conserve genetic diversity” and “the design and implementation of solutions designed to reduce biodiversity loss and enhance resilience to climate change.”
Restoration grants, by contrast, seek to bring “vitality back to degraded landscapes” and have focused on initiatives in Africa, through the Fund’s AFR100 initiative, and the U.S. The fund notes that restoration projects often come with “huge benefits in carbon sequestration, food security, water quality, income generation, and biodiversity protection.” Strategies include reforestation, planting tree farms and sustainable crops, planting mangroves in coastal areas and creating green spaces in urban areas.
Grantees of the Conserving & Restoring Nature program include Groundwork USA, the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, One Tree Planted, Eden Reforestation Projects and Re:Wild, among others.
Grants for Sustainable Agriculture and Food Systems
Through its Future of Food program, the Bezos Earth Fund has committed $1 billion to “help transform food and agricultural systems to support healthy lives without degrading the planet.” Key interests of this initiative are sustainable agriculture and the development of agricultural technologies that “capture and sequester vast amounts of greenhouse gases,” thereby reducing atmospheric carbon and mitigating climate change.
Grants have supported organizations including the Good Food Institute, Cornell University’s College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, the Krishi Vigyan Kendras Farm Science Centers and the Global Seaweed Coalition.
Important Grant Details:
The Bezos Earth Fund’s grants are generally awarded in amounts greater than $1 million, with some large-scale projects receiving amounts in the tens of millions.
Grantmaking is global in scope, but some individual programs name geographic areas of focus.
Grantee size ranges from large global NGOs to much smaller Indigenous-led and grassroots groups.
Collaborative projects, especially those that involve community involvement in hands-on-projects are prioritized.
Grants tend to support multi-year projects and programs.
Grantseekers can see lists of select grantees, subdivided by program area on the Fund’s Programs page.
This funder does not accept unsolicited proposals or requests for funding. Names and biographies of staff members are provided on the organization’s Our People page.
PEOPLE:
Search for staff contact info and bios in PeopleFinder (paid subscribers only).
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