Bezos Earth Fund
/OVERVIEW: The Bezos Earth Fund is a major climate funder created by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. It supports a range of climate change, clean energy, food and agriculture, and environmental initiatives globally.
IP TAKE: In just a few short years, The Bezos Earth Fund has established itself as one of the world’s most important climate and environment funders, with a broad mandate to invest in “big ideas” to “fight climate change and protect nature.” So far, the Fund has supported environmental justice and equitable climate solutions, as evidenced in its support for Indigenous-led projects, frontlines movement building, and urban green spaces. Funding many solutions rather than just silver bullets is another key theme, along with prioritizing land and food systems initiatives. While the Earth Fund supports data-driven research and emerging technologies, IP environmental reporter Michael Kavate notes that it also follows a “community-centered approach at a time when many new billionaire donors are sending the bulk of their climate checks to technological efforts and the world’s largest environmental organizations.”
The Earth Fund states that grantmaking can be anywhere from $1 million to hundreds of millions per grant, but the average grant errs decisively on the higher end, including substantial funding for re-grantors and intermediaries. The Fund does not run an open application program and appears to conduct its own research to locate and generate projects for funding. This is a very unlikely source of funding for grant seekers, though the Fund’s people page includes names and bios. Networking is key here.
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 “harness the best of human ingenuity, adaptability and collective action to create a future in which everyone can thrive.” Its grantmaking programs include 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.
The Bezos Earth Fund’s approach to grantmaking takes a “systems change” view. In this vein, the fund has a dedicated Systems Change Lab that “monitors, learns from and mobilizes action toward the transformational shifts needed to protect both people and the planet.” The fund’s How We Work section offers further insights into how it makes grants.
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 “front-line 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 toward 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’ 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 U.S. financial regulators as they address climate as a systemic risk.”
Grants through 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 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. 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.
The Earth Fund also pledged another $100 million to support the creation of large preserves to protect marine life in the Pacific Ocean impacted by climate change.
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. Additionally, the Earth Fund committed $60 million in 2024 to establish Bezos Centers for Sustainable Protein as part of the fund’s $1 billion commitment. The centers will work to develop protein alternatives to meat.
Grants from this initiative 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, so read each program area closely.
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.
Grant seekers 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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