Bezos Earth Fund Commits $100 Million as Private Donors Fill Widening Government Biodiversity Gap
Private capital fills gap as nations deliver less than half of promised biodiversity funding
YEREVAN, Armenia — Jeff Bezos’s philanthropic vehicle is directing $100 million into a new international species recovery alliance, part of a growing wave of private capital stepping into a funding vacuum left by governments that have failed to meet their own biodiversity finance targets.
The Bezos Earth Fund joined eight other organizations to launch the Species Recovery Alliance with a combined $500 million commitment, announced Wednesday at the UN’s COP17 biodiversity summit by Cristián Samper, the fund’s managing director. The move comes as OECD data shows nations delivered between $75 billion and $92 billion annually for nature protection from 2023 through 2025 — less than half the $200 billion yearly target set at the 2022 Montreal summit.
“We’re not moving fast enough,” Astrid Schomaker, executive secretary of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity, told the Associated Press ahead of the conference. A UN progress report found fewer than half of national biodiversity targets are on track.
The alliance’s other founding members include 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. Unlike traditional pooled funds, each member will direct its own grants while coordinating strategy — a structure designed to maintain donor control while avoiding duplication.
Grants will target species the International Union for Conservation of Nature classifies in its three highest-risk categories: endangered, critically endangered, or extinct in the wild. That list exceeds 31,000 species. Progress will be measured against the IUCN’s Green Status of Species, a relatively new metric that assesses recovery rather than just extinction risk.
The initiative builds on the Phoenix Species Project, launched in August by the Earth Fund and Re:wild with $200 million targeting 100 critically endangered species across 30 countries. That roster includes Madagascar’s golden-crowned sifaka and Australia’s night parrot, a species once presumed extinct.
Alongside the private alliance, 17 governments led by Colombia and Armenia launched a separate intergovernmental effort, the Coalition of Action to Recover Endangered Species. Samper called it “an encouraging expression of ambition” but warned that “the next step is to ensure that ambition is backed by the resources needed to deliver.”
For Bezos, the $100 million allocation represents a fraction of the $10 billion he pledged in 2020 to spend on climate and nature by 2030. The fund has distributed $2.4 billion to date, leaving more than $7 billion to deploy in roughly four years. Recent grants include $34 million for sustainable textiles, $26 million for wildfire detection, $100 million for urban parks in eight U.S. cities, and more than $25 million for Pacific Ocean conservation in September.
