“Amazon remains reliant on massive fleets of polluting delivery vehicles, wasteful packaging, and even a new fleet of jet-fuel-powered planes to keep speedily delivering stuff to impatient online shoppers,” as Vox’s Rebecca Heilweil reported this week. They just don’t do much to erode the root causes of biodiversity loss, which include the very culture of over-consumption and same-day convenience that has made Amazon Amazon. That’s not to say protected areas don’t work. While Bezos is known for disrupting the e-commerce world, one of his major approaches to conservation - bolstering the planet’s network of protected and conserved areas - is not new, and could even be considered old-school. Participants in the UN climate conference have pledged $1.7 billion in funding for Indigenous-led efforts, and more than $600 million is coming from nonprofit organizations like the Bezos Earth Fund, Bloomberg Philanthropies, and the Ford Foundation.īut not all experts are convinced that philanthropic money will forge a new path and make a dent in the extinction crisis. We won’t make those same mistakes.”īezos and other billionaires are promising to support Indigenous-led initiatives, which represents something of a paradigm shift in conservation. “Top-down programs fail to include communities, they fail to include Indigenous people that live in the local area. “I know that many conservation efforts have failed in the past,” Bezos said.

And he’s right, judging by the state of the environment: Populations of mammals, birds, amphibians, reptiles, and fish have declined by almost 70 percent on average since 1970, and the planet has lost about a third of its forests. In announcing the billion-dollar pledge last month, Bezos acknowledged that many past efforts to conserve nature haven’t worked. Combined, it was the largest private funding commitment ever to the conservation of biodiversity, which generally refers to diverse assemblages of species and functioning ecosystems. Bezos was joined by eight other donors - including Bloomberg Philanthropies and the Rob and Melani Walton Foundation, which is built on the Walmart fortune - who together committed an additional $4 billion to the cause. The investment comes on the heels of a $1 billion pledge by the Bezos Earth Fund to protect land and water, first announced in September.

Welcome to the age of billionaire biodiversity conservation.Īs climate change scorches the planet and a global extinction crisis escalates, the ultrarich have started funneling bits of their wealth into protecting nature.Īt the UN climate conference in Glasgow this week, Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon and the wealthiest person on Earth, pledged $2 billion to protect the environment and overhaul food systems as part of his $10 billion Earth Fund.

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