$5B conservation plan offers new approach, but faces hurdles

A pledge by nine grantmakers to give $5 billion to conservation efforts that address threats to biodiversity and to help curb climate change is taking a different approach than philanthropy has embraced in the past — one that may require those organizations to do things differently.

The announcement made last week of what the grantmakers are calling the “Protecting Our Planet Challenge” was designed to help jump-start support for the global effort, dubbed 30x30, to protect 30% of the land and 30% of oceans by 2030, which 72 countries have already signed onto. It will be discussed as a possible global goal in the Convention on Biological Diversity, a United Nations treaty similar to climate agreements.

Jeff Bezos announced last week that his new organization, the Bezos Earth Fund, will contribute $1 billion to this effort. He said previous conservation efforts had failed because they did not include local and Indigenous people. “We won’t make those same mistakes,” he said. “We’ll support a new generation of programs. They’re led by the local communities that focus on livelihoods and incentives and offer better paths to prosperity.”

The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation expects to contribute $1 billion. The Rainforest Trust and Wyss Foundation each pledged $500 million. The other grant makers are Arcadia, Bloomberg Philanthropies, Nia Tero, Re:wild, and the Rob and Melani Walton Foundation. The groups have not announced which nonprofits will receive the funds, but the Earth Fund said that it will direct money to the Congo Basin, tropical Andes, and tropical Pacific Ocean.

They have all pledged to work with Indigenous and local communities in their conservation efforts. Studies have found that natural places managed by Indigenous people contain healthy ecosystems and...