Bezos Earth Fund

The Bezos Earth Fund announced its first round of grant funding in November 2020, giving over $791 million in funding to 16 left-of-center environmentalist organizations. Grant recipients included some of the largest environmentalist organizations in the world, such as the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), and the Nature Conservancy (TNC). ⁴

It is unclear how grants are distributed by the Bezos Earth Fund as the grantmaking reported on its website and in press releases do not align with the Bezos Earth Fund Foundation’s tax return. ⁵ The Bezos Earth Fund Foundation’s initial tax return, in 2024, reported that it did not make any grants while over 99 percent of its expenditures went towards advising fees to Bezos Earth Fund LLC. ^{6 7}

History and Activity

In February 2020, Jeff Bezos announced on his Instagram page that he was forming the Bezos Earth Fund, a $10 billion initiative to combat climate change. The announcement came in the wake of Amazon employees pressuring Bezos to do more to combat climate change. ⁸

Bezos’s announcement called climate change “the biggest threat to our planet” and announced his commitment to funding environmentalist nonprofits. ⁹ Bezos’s $10 billion initial commitment to the Fund represented about 5 percent of his $184 billion net worth as of March 2021. As of April 2026, Bezos’s net worth was estimated by Forbes at $259.5 billion. ^{10 11 4} In 2019, one year prior to the announcement of the Earth Fund, American philanthropists together gave a total of $1.6 billion to environmentalist organizations. ¹²

In November 2020, Bezos announced the first round of Bezos Earth Fund grant recipients, including 16 environmentalist organizations that each received grants between $5 and $100 million. The Bezos Earth Fund distributed $791 million in total in its first round of funding. ⁴

Grant recipients included some of the largest, left-of-center environmentalist organizations in the world. The Fund distributed $100 million grants to each of the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), the Natural Resources Defense Council (NDRC), the Nature Conservancy (TNC), the World Resources Institute (WRI), and the World Wildlife Fund (WWF). ⁴ Other grant recipients include the ClimateWorks Foundation, the Energy Foundation, the NDN Collective, and the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS). ⁴

In March 2021, Bezos announced that the Bezos Earth Fund would spend all of its initial $10 billion endowment by 2030, distributing roughly $1 billion to environmentalist causes each year. That same month, Fund CEO Andrew Steer announced that the Bezos Earth Fund would also be investing in the private sector, indicating that some of the Fund may be structured as an investment engine, rather than a nonprofit project. As of March 2021, the Bezos Earth Fund has only contributed to nonprofit organizations. ^{1 12}

In January 2024, the Bezos Earth Fund was granted tax exempt status by the IRS as the “Bezos Earth Fund Foundation.” ¹³ The filing came after Jeff Bezos and his attorney Paul Dauber filed as beneficial owners for a limited liability company in June 2022 in Washington, D.C. under the name “Bezos Earth Fund LLC.” ^{14 15}

As of April 2026, the Bezos Earth Fund reported having distributed 335 grants worth $2.4 billion across seven grantmaking programs. It had committed $2 billion toward its conservation grantmaking program and $1 billion toward environmental groups that advocate lowering atmospheric carbon through changes in agricultural practices. It also has grantmaking programs that fund organizations that advocate for minority groups it claims are adversely affected by environmental issues, that advocate for eliminating conventional energy use, that ostensibly support free-market approaches to environmental issues, that research technological methods to reduce atmospheric carbon, and that collect environmental data in support of environmentalist goals. ⁵

Grantmaking

In 2020, the Bezos Earth Fund made a $100 million grant to the Environmental Defense Fund to produce a satellite to monitor methane emissions produced by oil and gas drilling, pipelines, and processing. The satellite, named MethaneSAT, was also funded by Google, Arnold Ventures, the Robertson Foundation, the TED Audacious Project, and was created through a partnership with the New Zealand Space Agency. It launched in March 2024 and claimed to have created a map of global emissions while monitoring conventional energy projects in over 120 countries. In June 2025, EDF reported that MethaneSAT had been lost in space. ¹⁶

In October 2025, the Bezos Earth Fund awarded a $2 million grant to the University of California, Davis and its partners to support “Swap it Smart,” an AI-powered project under the Fund’s AI for Climate & Nature Grand Challenge aimed at redesigning foods for sustainability, nutrition, and affordability. The initiative brings together UC Davis researchers with the Periodic Table of Food Initiative (PTFI), the American Heart Association, and the Rockefeller Foundation’s RF Catalytic Capital to leverage molecular data and generative AI to identify sustainable ingredient alternatives. Using PTFI’s extensive food composition database, which maps hundreds of thousands of proteins and bioactive compounds, the project seeks to develop tools that can be used by farmers, food manufacturers, and consumers to create nutritious, environmentally responsible meal, advancing the Bezos Earth Fund’s broader mission to apply AI for climate and planetary health solutions. ¹⁷

In January 2026, the Bezos Earth Fund announced a $3.5 million grant to support the Nuclear Scaling Initiative (NSI), a collaborative effort led by the Clean Air Task Force, EFI Foundation, and the Nuclear Threat Initiative. The initiative aims to accelerate the deployment of nuclear energy by promoting standardized reactor designs and an “orderbook” model in which multiple buyers commit to building the same reactor technology. According to the fund, the grant reflects growing interest in nuclear power as a low-carbon energy source amid rising electricity demand driven by data centers and artificial intelligence. The Bezos Earth Fund stated that the initiative aligns with its broader climate strategy. ¹⁸

In March 2026, the Pelican Institute for Public Policy published a report accusing Louisiana state regulators of preventing energy production and taking advantage of Louisiana’s conventional energy resources, through its “regulatory obstacles.” Additionally, it argued that over $115 million in funding from outside of the state, including $4 million from the Bezos Earth Fund, went to Louisiana-based advocacy groups that oppose conventional energy production. The report stated that the $115 million dollars made up 98.4 percent of the funding received by the anti-conventional energy organizations from 2020 through 2025. ¹⁹

Criticisms

While many environmentalists welcomed Bezos’s pledge and donation, many other left-progressive environmentalists criticized the Bezos Earth Fund. After the initial round of funding recipients was announced, critics accused Bezos of giving to organizations with “less diverse leadership” and insisted that grants be distributed instead to grassroots organizations led by ethnic minorities. ²⁰

The Fund has also been criticized by far-left environmentalists because its chosen grant recipients stress a technological approach to battling climate change rather than a full-scale, immediate rejection of all conventional energy sources. Other critics questioned the choice of grant recipients, given that TNC and WWF were facing scandals regarding discriminatory treatment of women and human rights abuses respectively at the time of the announcement. ^{11 21 22}

Much other criticism has centered around Amazon’s continued use of conventional energy sources, with opponents criticizing the Bezos Earth Fund for donating to environmentalist organizations as Amazon’s own carbon emissions grew during 2020. Critics also claimed that Amazon’s warehouse operations impacted people of color more than white people and demanded that grant funding be directed towards ethnic minorities in the future. The left-wing Climate Justice Alliance (CJA) went so far as to demand that the groups that received funding from the Bezos Earth Fund redirect 10% to 25% of their grant funding to a pooled fund for use by grassroots environmentalist organizations led by ethnic minorities. ²⁰

Amazon Employees for Climate Justice, a group of environmentalist Amazon employees, similarly criticized the measure, accusing the Fund of hypocrisy as Amazon continued to “ravage the Earth with still more oil and gas wells.” The advocacy organization also condemned Amazon donations to the right-of-center Competitive Enterprise Institute and demanded that the company move to entirely electric trucks, claiming that diesel fuel damaged “the lungs of children near its warehouses.” ²³

Some critics went so far as to accuse Bezos of starting the Fund purely to distract from Amazon’s work and scandals, claiming that he announced the Fund immediately after Amazon was ordered to pay a $62 million fine for withholding tips from delivery drivers. The critic called Bezos a “robber baron” trying to rehabilitate his image through the Bezos Earth Fund after “decades of making the lives of millions worse.” ²⁴ Similar criticisms accused the Fund of being a move by Bezos to consolidate power, instead calling for the government to “tax billionaires out of existence” rather than accepting philanthropy. ²⁵

Right-of-center critics took a different approach, calling upon the Bezos Earth Fund to make donations to organizations that focus on promoting high-quality economic development in areas likely to be affected by a transition away from conventional energy sources, such as rural America and the manufacturing industry. ²⁶

Advocacy

In addition to its goal of distributing $10 billion in grants by 2030, the Bezos Earth Fund advocates for restructuring the global economy to promote environmental causes by 2040. Its “Our View of the World” webpage has cited a 45 percent reduction in global poverty since 1970 and a 27 percent increase in life expectancy, but it argued that the related increases in food production have caused increases in greenhouse gas emissions. It added that emissions threaten catastrophic climate change and further associated emissions with alleged overpopulation. ²⁷ To address this, it advocates for eliminating conventional energy use, “decarbonizing steel and cement,” conservation, and reducing water use in agriculture. ²⁸

Leadership

The Bezos Earth Fund was created and endowed entirely by Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon and the richest man in the world at the time of its founding. Bezos’s wife, former news reporter Lauren Sanchez, also appears to be involved with the Fund, having met with several Earth Fund grant recipients in the past. ²⁹ Bezos and Sanchez directly oversaw and selected the first round of grant recipients for the Fund, operating the Bezos Earth Fund without a CEO until March 9, 2021. ²⁹

In March 2021, Bezos named Andrew Steer inaugural CEO of the Bezos Earth Fund. Steer previously worked as president and CEO of the World Resources Institute (WRI), an environmentalist nonprofit organization that received a $100 million grant from the Bezos Earth Fund in 2020. ²⁹ Before joining WRI, Steer worked as special envoy for climate change at the World Bank from 2010 to 2012. Steer spent several decades at the World Bank, holding positions ranging from director of environment and social policy to head of the World Bank in Vietnam and Indonesia. ³⁰

In July 2025, Bezos appointed Tom Taylor as the CEO of the Bezos Earth Fund. Taylor previously worked executive positions at Amazon and was in charge of the companies “Alexa” voice assistant division. ³¹ Taylor worked as a senior vice president for Amazon, spent 22 years with the company before retiring in 2022, and oversaw its artificial intelligence work. ³²