American billionaire Jeff Bezos' Earth Fund joins $500 million endangered species pledge

American billionaire Jeff Bezos' Bezos Earth Fund and eight other private funders have pledged more than $500 million over five years to recover the world's most threatened plants and animals, with the aim of building the largest coordinated philanthropic effort for species recovery.

The Species Recovery Alliance was launched on Oct. 16 at the COP17 United Nations biodiversity conference in Yerevan, Armenia. Its other founding members are 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.

The funders did not say how much each of them will contribute. They will not pool their money. Each member will instead line up its own grants with the others, share what it learns and work with local conservation groups on recovery plans built to show measurable results. Progress will be tracked against the Red List of Threatened Species and the Green Status of Species, both kept by the International Union for Conservation of Nature.

"I'm very pleased to announce today that we're launching a new Species Recovery Donor Alliance," Cristián Samper, the Bezos Earth Fund's managing director and leader for nature solutions, said at the summit. "Conservationists have shown that species can be brought back from the brink," he said in a statement released with the announcement. He urged other funders and governments to join.

More than 31,000 species at risk

The alliance will focus on species that the IUCN lists as extinct in the wild, critically endangered or endangered. There are more than 31,000 of them, including over 10,000 that are critically endangered. More than 10% of those species have fewer than 50 individuals left.

The funders said research shows that 57% of threatened species need targeted recovery work that goes beyond protecting their habitat.

Wes Sechrest, the co-founder and chief executive of Re:wild, said in the statement that "species recovery has not received the same level of attention and investment" as the fight against climate change. He said the alliance aims to make the recovery of threatened species a global conservation priority.

James Deutsch, chief executive of Rainforest Trust, said his group would concentrate on protecting habitat that endangered species depend on in tropical and subtropical regions.

Built on an earlier Bezos project

The new alliance builds on the Phoenix Species Project, which the Bezos Earth Fund and Re:wild launched in August with $200 million. Each group put in $100 million, with further support from Hollywood actor Leonardo DiCaprio, a co-founder of Re:wild, and others. That project aims to recover 100 critically endangered species in 30 countries, among them the golden-crowned sifaka, a lemur found only in Madagascar, and the night parrot of Australia.

"Not managing their decline. Recovering them. That's the whole difference," Lauren Sánchez Bezos, the vice chair of the Bezos Earth Fund, said at the time of that launch.

Bezos, the founder and executive chairman of Amazon.com Inc., set up the Earth Fund in 2020 with a pledge to give $10 billion of his own money to fight climate change and protect nature by 2030. He chairs the fund.

Governments also used the Yerevan meeting to set up a separate group, the Coalition of Action to Recover Endangered Species, led by Colombia and Armenia. It supports the global target, agreed in 2022 under the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, to halt human-caused extinctions of known threatened species. The government coalition operates separately from the private funders' pledge.