Jeff Bezos’s $10bn climate and biodiversity fund has halted its funding of one of the world’s most important climate certification organisations, amid broader concerns US billionaires are “bowing down to Trump” and his anti-climate action rhetoric.
The Bezos Earth Fund has stopped its support for the Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi), an international body that assesses if companies are decarbonising in line with the Paris agreement. Earth Fund had been one of two core funders of the SBTi, with the Ikea Foundation: the two accounted for 61% of its total funding last year. Earth Fund’s decision was first reported by the FT.
Spokespeople for Earth Fund and SBTi said the $18m (£14.5m) grant had been a three-year commitment that expired as previously agreed, and Earth Fund had not made a final decision on future support. But researchers familiar with the SBTi, as well as advisers at the organisation, raised concerns that the vanishing support was part of a broader trend of wealthy individuals moving away from funding causes that the US president – who has previously called climate change a hoax – did not agree with.
Prof Doreen Stabinsky, who is on the technical council of SBTi, said: “You look at Bezos and the folks he’s hanging out with in the billionaires club, and you realise this is about more than SBTi,” she said. “Bezos is bowing down to Trump in a way a bunch of billionaires are bowing down to Trump.”
Stabinsky said Bezos’s decision was “not surprising at all” given he previously stopped the editorial board of the Washington Post – which he owns – taking an endorsement position on presidential candidates.
It came as scientists described their “stress and fear” at Donald Trump’s executive orders to cut federal grant money. Mentions of the climate crisis have also been removed or downgraded across US government websites. Stabinsky said: “Climate for Trump is just one of those things that is very visible, very on his radar, very part of his messaging – anti-climate action, anti any corporate that is doing something that is visibly about climate change.”
Before Trump’s inauguration last month, the US’s six biggest banks quit the global banking industry’s net zero target-setting group. Kelly Stone, a senior policy analyst at ActionAid USA, said the move to no longer fund SBTi was “really disappointing, but not especially surprising at this point”, describing it as “part of a corporate wave” of abandoning green ambitions. She said: “We’re seeing a huge retreat from a lot of these climate pledges from the biggest corporate and financial actors.”
