OVERVIEW: The Bezos Earth Fund is a major climate funder created by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. It supports a range of climate change, conservation, clean energy, food and sustainable agriculture, and environmental initiatives globally.
IP TAKE: In just a few years, the Bezos Earth Fund has established itself as one of the world’s biggest environmental funders, with a broad mandate to invest in “big ideas,” to “fight climate change and protect nature.” Funding many solutions rather than just silver bullets is a key theme, along with prioritizing land and food systems initiatives. According to IP climate reporter Michael Kavate’s article, the Fund has “yet to award about three-quarters of the $10 billion Jeff Bezos originally pledged for it” and, perhaps in obeisance to Trump’s disdain for all things climate and environment, will no longer partner with the world’s top voluntary climate standards body, Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi). Meanwhile, a new initiative at the Earth Fund, the AI Grand Challenge for Climate and Nature, is committing a potential $100 million to support efforts to use AI to solve pressing climate and environmental issues around the world.
The Fund does not run an open application program and appears to conduct its own research to locate and generate projects for funding. While the Earth Fund does not maintain a grants database, relatively detailed information about its current and past grantees is available at the programs page for each of its seven programs. This is a very unlikely source of funding for grant seekers, though the Fund’s people page includes names and bios. Networking is key here.
PROFILE: Established in early 2020 with a $10 billion pledge to combat climate change, the Bezos Earth Fund was created by Jeff Bezos to address what he has called “the biggest threat to our planet.” The fund’s aim is to “harness the best of human ingenuity, adaptability and collective action to create a future in which everyone can thrive.” Its grantmaking programs include Conserving & Restoring Nature; Future of Food; Environmental Justice; Decarbonizing Energy & Industry; Economics, Finance & Markets; Next Technologies; and Monitoring, Data & Accountability.
The Bezos Earth Fund’s approach to grantmaking takes a “systems change” view. In this vein, the Fund has a dedicated Systems Change Lab that “monitors, learns from and mobilizes action toward the transformational shifts needed to protect both people and the planet.” The How We Work section offers further insights into how it makes grants.
Grants for Climate Change and Clean Energy
Climate change and clean energy constitute Bezos’s largest giving area. Grantmaking stems from five of the Fund’s grantmaking programs:
Grants for Environmental Justice support “front-line communities” that “experience the first and worst effects of climate change.” In the U.S., the fund has “ committed over $300 million to environmental justice groups” focusing on underserved areas, marginalized communities and underfunded climate issues.
A sub-initative, Greening America’s Cities, plans to distribute about $50 million a year in grants to to community and grassroots groups “devising urban greening solutions.” Early grantmaking has focused on programs in Albuquerque, Atlanta, Chicago, Los Angeles and Wilmington, Delaware, but the fund expects to add more cities to this roster in the coming years.
Greening America’s Cities grants have supported organizations including the national organization GreenLatinos, Delaware’s New Castle Prevention Coalition and Green Cities California.
Other U.S. Environmental Justice grantees include Gulf South for a Green New Deal, which works “to advance a just transition toward local sustainable economies” in states along the Gulf Coast, and Native Movement, an Alaska-based organization that pursues “community-driven solutions; from micro-grid renewable energy technologies to clean water and food security projects.”
According to its website, the Fund has also “convened a coalition of philanthropists who have committed $1.7 billion to support Indigenous People in tropical forest areas.” Support has been channeled to organizations including Colombia’s Conserva Aves Partners, the Wildlife Conservation Society, Conservation International and Nia Tero, which works with Indigenous-led groups to protect “4.2 million hectares of Indigenous territories in Colombia, Ecuador and Peru.”
Decarbonizing Energy & Industry grants support “innovative solutions to help decarbonize the economy” with the overarching goal of “spurring just and equitable systems transformations, accelerating decarbonization across key emitting sectors and geographies.”
One of this program’s largest commitments to date is a collaboration through which the Environmental Defense Fund, the government of New Zealand, the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory and Harvard University work to “identify methane pollution, hold those responsible accountable and highlight opportunities to manage and minimize oil and gas methane emissions.”
U.S. grantees of this program include the Energy Foundation, the Greenling Institute and the Union of Concerned Scientists.
Grantees working globally include the ClimateWorks Foundation, the Global Maritime Forum and the Global Energy Alliance for People and Planet.
Bezos’ Economics, Finance & Markets program seeks to “to accelerate changes in goods and financial markets to create a virtuous cycle of investment, prosperity, jobs, innovation, emission reductions and ecosystem protection.” The fund is a founding member of the Resilient Energy Economies Initiative, which provides research to policymakers on how to support communities affected by energy transition.
A main partner in this work is Resources for the Future, a nonprofit that conducts and disseminates research on “
- Other grantees include the Voluntary Carbon Market Integrity Initiative, the Energy Transitions Commission, ClimateWorks and the BlueGreen Alliance.
Grants through the Next Technologies program “advance promising new technologies that will reduce emissions, remove carbon, and protect our natural systems.”
Breakthrough Energy received funding for its efforts to advocate for and scale promising new clean energy technologies.
Other grantees include Pacific Environment, the University of Maryland and the Salk Institute, which used funding for research on the carbon storing potential of various plant roots.
Finally, through its Monitoring, Data & Accountability grantmaking program, the Bezos Earth Fund “invests in creating world-class data and science to inform priorities, track progress and hold actors accountable to their promises.”
Funding focuses on technologies for measuring and analyzing data related to “environmental challenges,” as well as initiatives that support “transparency and accountability for governments, companies and the financial sector.”
Grantees include the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, Yale University’s Program on Climate Change and GHG Protocol, which “supplies the world’s most widely used greenhouse gas accounting standards and guidance.“
- While not yet an established funding area, the Earth Fund established the AI Grand Challenge for Climate and Nature in 2025. Expected to be a $100 million commitment, this program will aim to “leverage the power of artificial intelligence to accelerate solutions to the world’s most pressing environmental challenges.”
- An initial round of grants supported a selection of “most promising initiatives” with grants of $50,000 for work in the areas of sustainable proteins, biodiversity, power grid optimization and a number of “wildcard” projects in other areas.
- Grantees include Cornell University’s College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, the Period Table of Food Initiative and the University of Witwatersand in South Africa, among others.
Grants for Environmental, Wildlife and Ocean Conservation
Bezos’s Conserving & Restoring Nature initiative is a $2 billion commitment to “conserve what we have, restore what we’ve lost, and grow what we need in harmony with nature.” The program, which will run until at least 2030, organizes grantmaking into conservation and restoration initiatives and names geographic priorities including Africa, the Brazilian Amazon, the Congo Basin, the Pacific Ocean, the Tropical Andes and the United States.
- Conservation grants target “solutions designed to help conserve nature and biodiversity based on science and data, working with local communities and Indigenous peoples.” In addition to land and water conservation, funding supports “gene banks that conserve genetic diversity” and “the design and implementation of solutions designed to reduce biodiversity loss” and enhance climate resiliency.
- Restoration grants, by contrast, seek to bring “vitality back to degraded landscapes” and have focused on initiatives in Africa through the fund’s AFR100 initiative. The fund notes that restoration projects often come with “huge benefits in carbon sequestration, food security, water quality, income generation and biodiversity protection.” Strategies include reforestation, planting tree farms and sustainable crops, planting mangroves in coastal areas and creating green spaces in urban areas.
- The Earth Fund has contributed over $150 million to the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation and over 200 local partners, “enabling the restoration and improved management of 2.7 million acres of land, an area larger than Yellowstone National Park, across 47 states” alongside work targeting the restoration and conservation of “the Northern Great Plains grasslands and longleaf pine forests of the Southeast.”
- Other grantees of the Conserving & Restoring Nature program include Botanic Gardens Conservation International, the Nature Conservancy, the Wildlife Conservation Society and the University of Geneva, which received funding for the development of AI “to predict and prevent wild-life human conflicts.”
- In 2023, the Earth Fund pledged $100 million to support the creation of large preserves to protect marine life in the Pacific Ocean impacted by climate change. In 2025, the fund extended the effort, and increased the pledge to $163.5 million for protection of “biologically rich waters of Costa Rica, Panama, Colombia and Ecuador.”
- Note that Biodiversity is an area of focus of the fund’s AI Grand Challenge for Climate and Nature, which will provide support for promising projects that use AI to develop solutions to pressing environmental issues around the world. Early grants have supported projects at Revive and Restore, the National Audubon Society, Cornell University’s Lab of Ornithology and the New York Botanical Garden, among others.
Grants for Sustainable Agriculture and Food Systems
Through its Future of Food program, the Bezos Earth Fund has committed $1 billion to “help transform food and agricultural systems to support healthy lives without degrading the planet.” Key interests of this initiative are sustainable agriculture and the development of agricultural technologies that “capture and sequester vast amounts of greenhouse gases,” thereby reducing atmospheric carbon and mitigating climate change.
- In 2025, the Bezos Earth Fund announced its support of a new Global Methane Hub, “a new initiative [that] will fund research and breeding programs across North America, Latin America, Europe, Africa, and Oceania to help herds emit less methane – naturally.”
- Grants from this initiative have supported organizations including the Good Food Institute, Cornell University’s College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, the Krishi Vigyan Kendras Farm Science Centers and the Global Seaweed Coalition.
- Related giving has also come from the fund’s AI Grand Challenge for Climate and Nature, which was established in 2025 and names “sustainable proteins” as an area of priority. Early grants from this initiative have supported projects at the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, Kings College in London and Food System Innovation, an “impact platform investing in a humane and sustainable future of food.”
- Additionally, the Earth Fund committed $60 million in 2024 to establish the Bezos Centers for Sustainable Protein as part of the fund’s $1 billion commitment. The centers will work to develop protein alternatives to meat at North Carolina State University.
Important Grant Details:
The Earth Fund states that grantmaking can be anywhere from $1 million to hundreds of millions per grant, but the average grant errs decisively toward the higher end, including substantial funding for re-grantors and intermediaries. As of this writing, the Earth Fund has made $2.3 billion in grants to over 270 organizations.
- Grantmaking is global in scope, but some individual programs name geographic areas of focus, so read each program area closely. A significant portion of research funding has recently gone to foreign universities.
- Giving runs the gamut from support for large-scale, ongoing projects by global NGOs to much smaller grassroots and Indigenous-led groups engaged in local, hands-on projects.
- This funder does not accept unsolicited proposals or requests for funding.
- Grant seekers can see lists of select grantees, subdivided by program area on the fund’s Programs page.
- This funder can be reached via email at info@bezosearthfund.org.
- Names and biographies of staff members are provided on the organization’s Our People page.
- Find social media links and newsletter signup at the bottom of the website.
PEOPLE:
Search for staff contact info and bios in PeopleFinder (paid subscribers only).
LINKS: