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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.
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