Jeff Bezos fund ends support for climate group amid fears billionaires ‘bowing down’ to Trump | Jeff Bezos

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.”

Peter Riggs, executive director of US nonprofit Pivot Point, said he was concerned “about how this will impact green investment generally, and investments in energy transitions, because obviously the signal from Washington right now is very strong that renewable energies and other kinds of zero-carbon or low-carbon approaches are actively discouraged. It’s not even that they’re being sidelined, they’re being eviscerated.”

In April last year, SBTi announced plans to allow companies to use carbon offsets from the voluntary carbon market for indirect emissions, in a move some believed was influenced by the Bezos Earth Fund. It provoked internal fury from staff, who said they had not been consulted, and warned that it opened the door to greenwashing.

Riggs said: “I think there are two things at play. One is that Bezos, or the Bezos Earth Fund, ultimately decided that they weren’t in the position, or weren’t willing to endorse, the science-based standard because of the challenges in it. And second, the political climate in Washington having changed – they didn’t want to draw a lot of attention to those kinds of commitments.”

An SBTi spokesperson said: “The three-year incubation grant made to the SBTi in 2021 by Bezos Earth Fund was designed to help us scale at the pace needed to meet extraordinary demand for our services. The grant expired in 2024 as originally agreed.”

A spokesperson from Bezos Earth Fund said: “In 2021, the Bezos Earth Fund made a three-year grant to SBTi for capacity building, which ended in December 2024 as originally agreed. There has been no change in the relationship between the Earth Fund and SBTi. SBTi has not requested additional funding from the Earth Fund. As a result, the Earth Fund has made no decision with regard to further funding.”