In 2020, a year before stepping down as Amazon’s CEO, Jeff Bezos pledged $10 billion to tackle some of the world’s biggest climate challenges by 2030 and unveiled the Bezos Earth Fund. The Amazon founder called climate change “the biggest threat to our planet,” promising that the money would support “scientists, activists, NGOs” and offer “a real possibility to help preserve and protect the natural world.” Six years later, the fund has awarded at least $2.4 billion across over 371 grants, according to its website. With around three-quarters of the pledge still to be allocated, the fund’s efforts have fallen behind schedule, though it says it remains committed to disbursing the full $10 billion by 2030.
Andrew Steer, former head of the World Resources Institute, became the Earth Fund’s first president and CEO in 2021. Last year, he was succeeded by Tom Taylor, the longtime Amazon executive who served on Bezos’ senior team (known as the S-Team) and once ran the company’s Alexa division. Bezos’s newlywed wife, Lauren Sánchez Bezos, serves as the Earth Fund’s vice chair.
The Earth Fund says it doesn’t “just write checks and walk away.” But how its projects are chosen remains largely opaque. Nor does it accept unsolicited proposals, saying its grantmaking is directed toward programs already identified on its website.
Therefore, the grants themselves offer the clearest picture of the fund’s priorities. While far from exhaustive, the list below includes some of the Earth Fund’s largest and most noteworthy donations to date.
Phoenix Species Project: $100 million pledged in 2026
In 2021, actor Leonardo DiCaprio and biologist Wes Sechrest met with Bezos and Sánchez to discuss various conservation topics. Those talks ultimately produced the $200 million Phoenix Species Project, unveiled this year. The effort aims to recover critically endangered species across 30 countries. More than 31,000 species assessed by the International Union for Conservation of Nature are categorized as endangered, critically endangered or extinct in the wild. Phoenix will concentrate on 100 of them—a fraction of the global crisis, but a test of whether sustained funding can do more than slow their disappearance.
The Earth Fund is supplying $100 million, while Re:wild, co-founded by Sechrest, has committed the other half with backing from DiCaprio, Dax Dasilva’s Age of Union and the Todd Graves Family Foundation. Graves, the billionaire founder of Raising Cane’s and a friend of DiCaprio’s said the actor’s work with Re:wild inspired him “to help in a meaningful way.”
From that small circle of wealthy donors, the money will flow through more than 100 partners, including Association Fanamby in Madagascar, Bush Heritage Australia and the Amphibian & Reptile Conservancy in North Carolina. The roster spans mammals, birds, amphibians, reptiles, fish, invertebrates and plants, from Australia’s elusive night parrot to Mexico’s Charco Azul pupfish. Others include the Hickory Nut Gorge green salamander, found only in a North Carolina canyon, and South Africa’s “fuzzy belly button,” a succulent poached for the ornamental-plant trade.
Each species will receive funding over five years, freeing conservationists from the shorter grant cycles that can disrupt recovery work. Organizers say Phoenix will track population recovery and reductions in threats, but the newly launched project is still too early to have produced measurable results.
The Opening Round: $791 million pledged in 2020
At $791 million, the Earth Fund’s first major outlay remains its largest. The oddly specific total covered 16 grants, but nearly two-thirds of the money was concentrated among five organizations: The Environmental Defense Fund, Natural Resources Defense Council, The Nature Conservancy, World Resources Institute and World Wildlife Fund each received $100 million.
The choices also foreshadowed who would run the fund. World Resources Institute, then led by Andrew Steer, received $100 million over five years for satellite-based land monitoring and an initiative helping U.S. school districts and others plan and finance electric buses. A few months later, Steer left WRI to become the Earth Fund’s first president and CEO.
The grants have since produced a mixed record. WWF said that by late 2025, its mangrove program had protected or restored more than 2.4 million acres across Colombia, Fiji, Madagascar and Mexico. EDF, meanwhile, put part of its grant toward MethaneSAT, a satellite built to detect methane emissions from oil and gas operations. It collected data for roughly a year before its team lost contact with the satellite in 2025. EDF said the broader effort would continue, including through MethaneAIR, a sensor-equipped aircraft.
Greening America’s Cities: $400 million pledged in 2023
Sánchez Bezos is the public face of Greening America’s Cities, which focuses on creating cooler, healthier neighborhoods. In 2023, she unveiled the $400 million program at Los Angeles’ Pacoima Wash alongside then-White House senior adviser John Podesta, Sen. Alex Padilla and other leaders. As extreme heat makes the cooling effects of trees and parks more consequential, access to green space is becoming a form of urban infrastructure.
By mid-2026, the Earth Fund had deployed $150 million through 39 grants in 11 cities, supporting local nonprofits and community-led projects, often in partnership with city governments. In Los Angeles, Pacoima Beautiful, a woman-led environmental justice group founded by local mothers, received $3.5 million to help turn the Pacoima Wash from a flood-control channel into a greenway. In Chicago, Grow Greater Englewood is using its $3.8 million to help convert more than 10 acres of polluted land into an agricultural-eco district and nature trail.
When the Earth Fund announced a second $100 million round of the total commitment in July, Sánchez Bezos recalled taking the bus after school to her grandmother’s Albuquerque home and spending hours in a nearby park. “That’s what we’re trying to give people with this program,” she said. “Not just green space. A place that feels like yours.”
Sustainable Protein Network: $100 million announced in 2024
The Earth Fund’s alternative-protein push also began with Sánchez Bezos, who unveiled the first $60 million at Aspen Ideas: Climate in 2024. Rather than backing consumer brands, the fund committed nearly all of the eventual $100 million to university research aimed at making plant-based, cultivated and fermented proteins cheaper, better-tasting and easier to produce.
Steer, then the Earth Fund’s president and CEO, framed it as a way to slow the expected rise in meat production without asking everyone to give up meat. “We don’t all need to become vegetarians,” he said at a 2024 Council on Foreign Relations event. The Good Food Institute estimates global meat demand could rise by more than 50 percent by 2050.
The commitment includes $30 million each for Bezos Centers for Sustainable Protein at North Carolina State University, Imperial College London and the National University of Singapore, plus a $9.8 million grant to the Good Food Institute, which helped scope and select the centers. In Singapore, Professor Zhou Weibiao and other researchers are developing what the center calls “ultimate proteins,” including through biomass fermentation that uses tofu-processing waste to feed microalgae.
The Brazilian Amazon: $100 million awarded between 2023 and 2025
Since 2023, the Earth Fund has awarded $100 million across at least 30 grants in the Brazilian Amazon, betting that the rainforest stands a better chance when its residents can make a living from it.
Cristián Samper, the fund’s nature lead and a former Wildlife Conservation Society CEO, has described the work as finding “alternative paths to prosperity” for people living in the Amazon.
On the ground, that includes a $4.2 million grant supporting Cooperacre and SOS Amazonia. The cooperative is adding equipment and infrastructure to expand the sustainable production of rubber, fruits, nuts, oils, coffee and cacao harvested from protected reserves.
Along the Rio Negro, the Earth Fund is also backing FOIRN, the region’s Indigenous federation, to strengthen land governance across 13.5 million hectares of forest, helping communities make collective decisions in a region threatened by logging, mining and other land clearing pressures.
A broader $30.9 million package was awarded to Nia Tero, Rainforest Foundation Norway, Rainforest Trust and the Wildlife Conservation Society, working with local partners. Their projects range from strengthening Indigenous land governance to securing new protected and conserved areas.
