Amazon CEO and business mogul Jeff Bezos announced on Monday, November 16, that he will be giving $791-million in grants to 16 organizations dedicated to fighting climate change and protecting the environment. The grants will be part of the $10 billion ‘Bezos Earth Fund’, which he initially started in February 2020.
‘I’ve 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,’ Bezos wrote in an Instagram post on Monday.
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The 16 organisations that will receive the grant include a wide variety of reforestation and climate justice groups and NGO’s, although he did not mention exactly how much would go to each group.
These include: The Environmental Defense Fund, The Hive Fund for Climate and Gender Justice, Natural Resources Defense Council, The Nature Conservancy, NDN Collective, Rocky Mountain Institute, and Salk Institute for Biological Studies, just to name a few.
The announcement comes one year after Amazon launched The Climate Pledge. An initiative that saw the company make huge strides towards committing to being 100% powered by renewable energy by 2025. To achieve this goal, Amazon has invested $100 million into reforestation projects along with purchasing 100,000 electric delivery vehicles.
The $10 billion Bezos Earth Fund certainly won’t put a dent in Bezos’s overall net worth, as it is equivalent to just 7 percent of his net worth, which sits at $184 billion, according to estimates from the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
Bezos’s commitment to the Bezos Earth Fund may come as a surprise to many, especially as Amazon has recently been criticized for the impact it has on the environment, according to CNN. These criticisms led to thousands of employees signing a letter of concern in May 2019, asking the company how it intends on responding to climate change issues. Employees part of the ‘Amazon Employees for Climate Justice’ also staged a mass walk-out in September 2019 as a way to urge the company to do more in terms of protecting the environment.
Picture: Twitter/@lunagiiselle
