Jeff Bezos to give away $1 billion a year to fight climate change

The yearly donation is nearly as big as the total spent on US climate philanthropy each year

FILE - In this June 19, 2019, file photo, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos speaks during the JFK Space Summit at the John F Kennedy Presidential Library in Boston. Bezos is one of the 50 Americans who gave the most to charity in 2020, according to the Chronicle of Philanthropy’s annual rankings ((AP Photo/Charles Krupa, File))

Outgoing Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos plans to give away $1 billion a year for the next decade to fight climate change as part of his Bezos Earth Fund.

Last year, Mr Bezos, the world’s richest man, announced the formation of the $10 billion fund. Besides an initial $791 million round of grants to major environmental organisations last year, which Bezos called “just the beginning”,  there aren’t many details about how the fund would operate.

Andrew Steer, the former head of the World Resource Institute, revealed the goal as part of his announcement on Tuesday that he’d been made CEO of the Earth Fund.

“The Earth Fund will invest in scientists, NGOs, activists, and the private sector to help drive new technologies, investments, policy change and behaviour,” he wrote on Twitter. “We will emphasise social justice, as climate change disproportionately hurts poor and marginalised communities.”

The aggressive timeline would be the only way to meet the Sustainable Development Goals, Mr Steer added, a set of UN priorities around global development and environmental protection.

In November, the fund announced its first grant recipients, which included $100 million each to large, mainstream environmental organisations like the Environmental Defense Fund, the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Nature Conservancy, the World Resources Institute, and the World Wildlife Fund. 

Mr Bezos, who announced the fund last February, made sustainability a major priority at Amazon in his final years at the company, from which he will step down as CEO later this year. The company has a $2 billion climate fund of its own, and aims to be net-carbon zero by 2040, a decade before the targets of the Paris Climate Accords.

Climate activists and Amazon employees themselves have criticised the company’s sustainability efforts, noting that it continues to do business with fossil fuel companies.