Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez Bezos are putting $100 million behind the idea that the world’s most endangered animals and plants can still be pulled back from extinction.
The Bezos Earth Fund is one of nine founding members of the new Species Recovery Alliance, a $500 million commitment announced Oct. 16 at the Leaders’ Summit of COP17, the UN biodiversity conference in Yerevan, Armenia, by Cristián Samper, the fund’s managing director and leader of nature solutions.
The Earth Fund is contributing $100 million of that total, a spokesperson told Fortune.
“We know how to bring species back from the brink,” Samper said in a statement to Fortune. “What too many conservation teams lack is reliable funding to keep that work going. Rebuilding a population can take years, and a break in support can put hard-won progress at risk.”
The other founding members are Leonardo DiCaprio’s Re:wild, Rainforest Trust, the Colossal Foundation, the Critical Ecosystem Partnership Fund, Fondation Segré, the Franklinia Foundation, the Ayers Wild Cat Conservation Trust, and WildLives Earth.
Members won’t pool their money into a single fund. Instead, each will direct its own grants while coordinating with the others. The money will go to conservation groups and local partners working on species the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) classifies as endangered, critically endangered, or extinct in the wild.
Depending on the species, that could mean breeding animals in captivity and releasing them, restoring habitat, managing disease, or controlling invasive species. Members will measure their progress using the IUCN’s Red List and its Green Status of Species, the fund said. The alliance is targeting a long list. More than 49,500 species are threatened with extinction, according to the IUCN Red List. The alliance will fund work on species in the three highest-risk categories (endangered, critically endangered, and extinct in the wild), which together include more than 31,000 species.
The alliance builds on the Phoenix Species Project, which the Earth Fund launched in August with Re:wild, the conservation group co-founded by DiCaprio. Each organization committed $100 million to Phoenix, for a total of $200 million. The project aims to recover 100 critically endangered and extinct-in-the-wild species across 30 countries, including Madagascar’s golden-crowned sifaka and Australia’s elusive night parrot.
“Kids fall in love with animals before anyone tells them those animals are disappearing. Ask any seven-year-old about their favorite creature. It’s something wild,” Sánchez Bezos said in a statement at the time. “Something most adults have never heard of. What do we tell them when the night parrot or the golden-crowned sifaka isn’t there anymore to fall in love with? This project is our answer.”
Filling a government gap
The new pledge comes as governments fall far behind their own nature-funding targets. At the 2022 biodiversity summit in Montreal, countries pledged to raise $200 billion a year for biodiversity by 2030. Countries raised between $75 billion and $92 billion a year from 2023 through 2025, which was less than half of that goal, according to Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development data cited by the Associated Press. A UN progress report released ahead of the summit found fewer than half of countries’ biodiversity targets are on target.
“We’re not moving fast enough,” Astrid Schomaker, executive secretary of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity, told the AP.
Alongside the private alliance, 17 governments led by Colombia and Armenia launched a separate initiative, the Coalition of Action to Recover Endangered Species (CARES). Samper called it “an encouraging expression of ambition,” but “the next step is to ensure that ambition is backed by the resources needed to deliver.”
“Philanthropy can help accelerate recovery, and sustained public funding is essential to achieving it at scale,” he continued.
The $10 billion clock
Bezos, the Amazon founder worth $372 billion, launched the Earth Fund in 2020 with a $10 billion pledge to fight climate change and protect nature by 2030, which is the largest individual philanthropic commitment to climate and nature ever. Sánchez Bezos, the fund’s vice chair since its early days, has become a more visible face of the couple’s giving.
The fund has granted $2.4 billion to date, the spokesperson told Fortune. That leaves more than $7 billion to distribute in about four years. Fund officials told Bloomberg in May they remain committed to the target.
The pace of giving has been steady in recent months. The fund has announced $34 million for sustainable fabrics, $26 million for wildfire detection, $100 million to turn vacant urban land into parks in eight U.S. cities, and more than $25 million in Pacific Ocean grants in September.
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