The Bezos Earth Fund is promising to pour $2 billion into environmental protection, said founder Jeff Bezos as he spoke to world leaders at the COP26 climate summit on Tuesday, November 2nd.
“Nature is beautiful, but it is also fragile,” said Bezos at the conference. “I was reminded of this in July when I went into space with Blue Origin. I was told seeing the earth from space changes the lens through which you view the world, but I was not prepared for just how much that would be true.”
The Bezos Earth Fund is a large part of Bezos’s pledge to spend at least $10 billion on fighting climate change and climate damage in this decade. In September this year, the Fund pledged to award $1 billion in grants to conservation efforts.
“Each year, forests and landscapes absorb 11 billion tons of CO2 from the atmosphere. As we destroy nature, we reverse this process,” he told the event in Glasgow, U.K., while calling 2021 a critical year. “In too many parts of the world, nature is already flipping from a carbon sink to a carbon source. This is a profound danger to us all.
“Together, this $3 billion in pledges will drive a new threefold nature agenda for the Bezos Earth Fund, focused simultaneously on conservation, restoration and food transformation,” Bezos said. “We must conserve what we still have, we must restore what we’ve lost and we must grow what we need to live without degrading the planet for future generations to come.”
Bezos, who stepped down from his role as Amazon’s CEO in July this year, has been focusing on Blue Origin and the Earth Fund. While the Fund is a commendable effort, many critics point out that Blue Origin, along with SpaceX and other private space travel industries, are at risk of doing more environmental damage than any amount of money could undo.
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