Bezos Earth Fund Announces Recipients of Nearly $450 Million

The Bezos Earth Fund has announced the recipients of nearly $450 million in grants to environmental-justice and conservation groups as part of its overall effort to help curb climate change. The announcement sheds more light on pledges the fund made this fall.

“We want to be one part of a shift in resources so that we benefit both from the expertise of the traditional environmental organizations and the different and complementary skills of environmental-justice groups,” said Andrew Steer, CEO of the Bezos Earth Fund. “The goal is to support a really new way of doing business.”

The $10 billion Earth Fund will award $130 million in grants to 19 climate-justice organizations in support of the Justice40 initiative. That is a government effort to direct 40 percent of the benefits of government investments in climate and clean energy to disadvantaged communities. The Earth Fund grants will help groups develop the skills and infrastructure necessary to qualify for the government funds, provide training so people in underserved communities can get hired for these projects, and gather and analyze data to ensure that the government funds get to the communities that need them. Native American groups received $38 million from the Earth Fund to help them get these funds for clean energy and climate-resilient development on tribal lands.

“We’re still trying to grasp the enormity of this right now,” said Tanksi Clairmont, director of the Tribal Solar Accelerator Fund, which is part of Grid Alternatives. “Twelve million dollars is a huge influx of funding.”

Her organization helps federally recognized tribes pay for solar installations and job training in renewable energy. For years, demand has far outstripped the group’s finances. The organization usually gets about $7 million in funding requests annually but can only give out about $1.6 million.

“With this grant funding, we’re going to be able to support a lot more tribes and individuals,” Clairmont said.

‘Work Against Time’

The Greenlining Institute received $10 million in funding. The group works primarily on economic disparities that communities of color face in California. CEO Debra Gore-Mann says that in the past half dozen years, it’s become clear that climate change and environmental issues are inextricably entwined with the economic future of these communities.

The group plans to pass along $5 million to organizations in the communities where it works. It will spend an additional $1 million to create a seed fund to help small groups grow. Greenlining will spend the rest of the money to expand its own work, particularly its partnerships in cities across the country.

The money will act as an accelerant to allow Greenlining and the groups it funds to do more and as a catalyst to bring in new organizations and amplify the message. “Those are the two things that resource allows us to do,” Gore-Mann says. “We have to because getting to zero carbon emissions, it’s all of us doing the work against time.”

Small, Understaffed Groups

Environmental-justice groups have long been underfunded. A recent report by Carbon Switch found that environmental nonprofits received only about 2 percent of all philanthropic funding. And environmental-justice groups received just 0.5 percent of that money — somewhere from $25 million to $50 million.

Out of the top 200 environmental groups by revenue, only three are environmental-justice groups, the report found.

“Marginalized communities, communities of color, are already being impacted by climate change so much more than those with more privilege and resources,” says Michael Thomas, the group’s founder and the author of the report. “Yet donors are giving such a small amount of money to those communities.”

Many groups feel cut off from big foundations that have lengthy, complex applications and reporting procedures, which can be overwhelming for the tiny, understaffed groups. For example, Clairmont and another person are the Tribal Solar Accelerator Fund’s only staff.

She was very happy the Earth Fund contacted her. They had a few conversations, and Tribal Solar submitted a proposal. “It was a very streamlined process compared to other funders,” she says.

The grants, however, do have some restrictions. Steer says he wants them to be flexible, but they do contain broad objectives that come out of the conversations Earth Fund staff had with the potential grantees. “These are programs designed by them,” he says.

New Networks

In September, Jeff Bezos announced a $1 billion commitment to conservation worldwide that he said would focus on funding local and Indigenous communities, which are often the best at protecting their natural environments. On Monday the Earth Fund detailed where $261.1 million of that money will go.

The grants will go to organizations that work in the Congo Basin, the tropical Andes, and a marine protected area around the Galapagos Islands. One of the goals of the grants is to create a network of groups that work together on conservation that includes the communities that live in the forests, expert nonprofits, and governments both within those countries and internationally. Britain, France, Germany, and Norway, for example, are involved in conservation efforts in the Congo, Basin he says.

Conservation International received $20 million for its work in the Amazon. It has a $200 million conservation plan for the region, about half of which will be funded by private donations, says CEO M. Sanjayan . “What the Bezos Earth Fund does is give it a real shot in the arm on the private side,” he says.

Destruction in the Amazon is pushing the forest toward a tipping point beyond which it will not recover, Sanjayan says. The group plans to fund Indigenous communities — some of which it has worked with for decades — as they already manage some the most biologically diverse parts of the forest.

The new funding will allow Conservation International to protect 1.1 million hectares, improve the management of 8 million hectares, and impact 60,000 people who live in the region.

Sanjayan expects the money from the Bezos Earth Fund will help attract more support from other donors and governments. “You can often use private, flexible philanthropy to get at least a [one-to-one match], if not a four- or five-to-one match,” he says. “That is what we hope to be able to do.”