Jeff Bezos' Earth Fund dedicates another $ 443 million to climate justice and conservation

On Monday, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos announced the latest round of grants from his Earth Fund - $ 443 million to be spent primarily on land conservation and restoration and efforts to reduce environmental burdens on underserved communities. The fund has pledged more than $ 3 billion for similar initiatives this year. In 2020, Bezos promised to funnel $ 10 billion, about 5 percent of his current net worth, to address climate change this decade.

From the beginning, the Bezos Earth Fund has faced criticism, particularly from some grassroots environmental groups. At first, critics said that Bezos primarily funded big-name environmental groups with historically white leadership and comparatively large budgets rather than supporting more indigenous and community groups of people of colour. Other criticisms centred on how Amazon, the e-commerce giant Bezos founded, continues to pollute neighbourhoods and emit ever-increasing levels of greenhouse gases.

Since that early reaction, environmental justice, a movement to stop pollution and ecological degradation from disproportionately harming low-income neighbourhoods, communities of colour, and other vulnerable groups, has become a more critical part of Bezos's message Earth Fund. The latest round of funding from the fund reserves $ 130 million for 19 different organizations doing "critical climate justice work." It follows another $ 150 million pledged to climate justice groups in September.

The $ 130 million for environmental justice in this latest round of funding support the Biden administration's Justice Initiative 40. Shortly after taking office in January, Biden created the initiative through an executive order to ensure that "disadvantaged communities" receive 40 percent of the "overall benefits" from federal investments in clean energy and climate action.

Bezos' beneficiaries include a wide range of groups that collect data to inform policy-making, help underserved communities become more resilient to climate change, support tribes and native communities, or plan to create training programs for the initiative. Justice40. For example, GRID Alternatives, a nonprofit organization working to increase access to solar energy, will raise $ 12 million for its Tribal Solar Accelerator Fund.

The latest funding announcement also includes $ 261 million allocated to the international initiative to conserve 30 percent of the Earth's lands and oceans by 2030. That will focus on the creation, expansion, and monitoring of so-called "protected areas. ", mainly in the Congo basin and tropical regions. According to the Bezos Earth Fund, the Andes, the grants will create 11 million hectares of new protected areas in the Congo Basin, where 70 percent of Africa's forests are located. In the tropical Andes, another major carbon sink on the planet, donations will convert approximately 48 million hectares into protected areas.

The Bezos Earth Fund says the new protected areas will help "secure" the rights of local communities over 24 million hectares of land. It is also spending an additional $ 25 million to put in place a new type of "global mechanism" that could secure "support" for indigenous peoples and local communities. Forests have tended to do better in their care, research shows. There is also an additional $ 51 million to restore landscapes in the US and Africa.