Jeff Bezos announces $791 million in grants to 16 organisations working to fight climate change
The grants are part of Bezos's $10 billion Earth Fund that was announced earlier this year
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos on Monday revealed the names of 16 organisations that have been selected to receive $791 million in grants from Amazon's $10 billion Earth Fund.
Bezos said in an Instagram post that he had spent "the past several months learning from a group of incredibly smart people who've made it their life's work to fight climate change and its impact on communities around the world."
"I'm inspired by what they're doing, and excited to help them scale," he added.
Bezos said that all 16 recipients are "working on innovative, ambitious and needle-moving solutions" to fight climate change.
Some groups will use the funds for specific projects, while others will provide grants to other non-profit organisations.
The groups that have been selected to receive grants from Bezos Earth Fund are:
- World Resources Institute
- World Wildlife Fund
- Environmental Defense Fund
- Natural Resources Defense Council
- The Nature Conservancy
- ClimateWorks Foundation
- The Climate and Clean Energy Equity Fund
- The Hive Fund for Climate and Gender Justice
- The Solutions Project
- Energy Foundation
- Salk Institute for Biological Studies
- Union of Concerned Scientists
- NDN Collective
- Dream Corps Green For All
- Rocky Mountain Institute
- Eden Reforestation Projects
The first five groups (in the list) will receive $100 million each, while remaining 11 organisations will receive grants between $5 million and $50 million.
Bezos said that the newly announced grants were "just the beginning" of the Earth Fund.
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In February, the ecommerce chief announced the launch of his $10 billion Earth Fund to assist climate-oriented activists, scientists and other organisations in their efforts to combat climate change.
Bezos described climate change as "the biggest threat to our planet" and said that he wanted to work with other people "to explore new ways of fighting the devastating impact of climate change on this planet we all share".
Since then, Amazon has announced similar initiatives to address criticisms (even from its own employees) that the company's shipping and e-commerce businesses fuel global carbon emissions.
In May 2019, thousands of Amazon employees signed a letter asking the management how the company planned to respond to climate change, an issue to which Bezos failed to respond at the time.
Last year, Amazon pledged to be 100 per cent powered by renewable energy by 2025 and to become carbon neutral by 2040, a decade before the Paris Accord target for net zero emissions.
In June, it unveiled a $2bn venture investment programme to support "visionary companies whose products and services will facilitate the transition to a zero carbon economy".
Then in September, it announced the first recipients of its $2 billion Climate Pledge Fund that aims to invest in "sustainable and decarbonising technologies."
However, when funds promised for the summer failed to materialise, Amazon was accused by some environmental activists of making grand announcements without backing them up. Monday's announcement goes some way to addressing this criticism.
Amazon also plans to buy a fleet of electric vans to start delivering packages to customers in 2021. It announced recently that about 10,000 of those vehicles would start operating by 2022, while the entire fleet of 100,000 vehicles would be operational by 2030.