The Bezos Earth Fund announced grants amounting to $110 million as part of its $10 billion commitment to drive climate and nature solutions while advancing environmental justice.

The Bezos Earth Fund, founded in 2020, is Jeff Bezos’ commitment to fund entities and individuals who can deliver solutions to fight climate change and help restore and conserve nature. The $10 billion funds will be zeroed out by 2030, the same deadline for achieving the UN SDGs.

Bezos has been criticized for the amount of carbon that Amazon emits. The retail giant has pumped millions of tons of carbon into the air each year, totaling to over 71 million metric tons as of 2021. Personally, Bezos is trying to reverse that through the Fund.

Last year, Bezos pledged $2 billion towards environmental conservation. The goal is to protect 30% of the Earth’s land and sea by 2030.

Bezos Earth Fund Climate Commitment

The current $110 million funding will be for restoration efforts in Africa and the United States as well as advance climate science, monitoring, and governance in carbon markets.

Restoration Efforts in the U.S.

Restoring deforested and degraded land is one of the most cost-effective climate change solutions.

Recognizing this, Bezos Earth Fund grants the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation with $30 million. The aim is to restore 1.25 million acres of land and forests in the Northern Great Plains and the longleaf pine ecosystem in the American South.

Restoration efforts at this scale can capture carbon and protect biodiversity, particularly in the most significant but damaged ecosystems in the U.S. Community leaders will be the one to design and execute restoration in those areas.

The African Forest Landscape Restoration Initiative

The Fund also awarded another $50 million to AFR100, a local restoration initiative in Africa. It seeks to restore 100 million hectares of deforested and degraded landscapes by 2030. $27.2 million of that funding is given to One Tree Planted, One Acre Fund, World Resources Institute and Realize Impact for restoring the Greater Rusizi Basin and Great Rift Valley.

The Greater Rusizi Basin is known as the ‘lungs of the world’ while the Greater Rift Valley provides habitat for critical forests in Kenya.

Kenya’s Great Rift Valley

The fund from Bezos will serve as grants and loans to projects that restore the land in the region. It will also support initiatives that provide training and monitoring to help scale up those projects. Commenting on this, Vice Chair of the Bezos Earth Fund Lauren Sánchez said:

“Locally-led initiatives can help us fight climate change and protect biodiversity globally, and we are proud to work with partners on the ground to advance these efforts.”

Meanwhile, the Fund’s CEO and President also remarked:

“Local groups are central to achieving global restoration goals. By supporting the African Forest Landscape Restoration Initiative, the Bezos Earth Fund is working to remove three critical barriers to locally led restoration…”

Those barriers include:

Building capacity and drawing on the existing expertise in the region to help restoration projects scale
Ensuring that finance reaches frontline groups
Ensuring that best-in-class monitoring systems are in place to track progress on the ground

Advancing Climate Science, Promoting Integrity in Carbon Markets, & Improving Governance

With a $10 million commitment, Bezos Earth Fund works with the experts in climate science to give real-time attribution of specific extreme weather events. Examples are fires, droughts, and hurricanes happening in the U.S., the UK, and India.

Carbon markets play a vital role in addressing climate change. They can drive hundreds of millions of dollars to climate solutions. But high standards and strict rules are key to success.

Without them, low-quality carbon credits and unfounded greenwash claims can undermine the market’s potential to deliver billions of tons of emission reductions and removals.

This is where the Fund comes in to help address market governance and credits quality. A $11 million funding goes to initiatives that provide a label for high-quality carbon credits. Example is that of The Integrity Council for the Voluntary Carbon Market that helps buyers find high-quality credits.

Grants for those kinds of initiatives will be to instill trust in carbon credits.

And since the public sector also has a big role to take on climate action, the Bezos Earth Fund is also giving a $2.3 million grant to train public officials. The Fund partners with the Government Climate Campus, an initiative looking to close the gap in climate skills and knowledge among key government officials.

Together they will train the first 5,000 officials in the U.S., Brazil, and India across government levels. By 2025, the number will go up to 50,000 public leaders trained to reduce emissions by 50% within the decade.

In summary, here’s the list of the grants awarded by the Bezos Earth Fund:

The UN Biodiversity Conference (COP15) in Montreal seeks to reverse nature loss and restore biodiversity, but some groups suggested payments for this huge task with “biodiversity credit”.

According to a UN report, the world needs over $384 billion a year by 2025 to protect nature. That goes up to $674 billion by 2050. Biodiversity credits play a critical role to fill that money up.

The Concept of Biodiversity Credit

Biodiversity credits are patterned after the concept of carbon credits. Each carbon credit represents a 1 tonne reduction of carbon emissions.

However, things are more complicated with preserving or restoring biodiversity. There are plenty of metrics involved to track progress. So analysts can’t agree on many things.

For instance, what these credits must look like and how to use them. Some even say that the scheme may go wrong if it allows firms to buy credits as permits for degradation elsewhere.

As the debate continues during the summit, many questions remain on the table.

The hardest one to address is how to value biodiversity uniformly. There are simply millions of diverse species of flora and fauna. Plus, the biodiversity in each area is unique.

So, how should the market price the value of fungi living in a forest? Or the variety of plant species under the ocean?

No Unified Approach to Quantify Biodiversity Gains

Some organizations, including businesses and academics, believe that biodiversity credits can drive financing toward nature conservation. They have some proposals for different methodologies.

With nature’s complexity, various methodologies may exist, according to a founder of a biodiversity credit firm. For example, a well-preserved natural habitat may have to quantify only conservation costs. But an area that needs restoration may have to also measure increases in species richness.

Some don’t even propose to track the flora or fauna. They instead value efforts such as hiring rangers or implementing monitoring systems to avoid deforestation.

But there’s one approach that aims to measure and value biodiversity gains. Wallacea Trust, a UK non-profit, monitors at least 5 animal categories in an area. Each of them is valued based on how rare the species are in the country, and their abundance is estimated.

For every 1% increase in species abundance/richness or prevented loss per hectare, one biodiversity credit is generated.

Implementing Voluntary Market for Biodiversity Credits

The big question remains on why companies should buy biodiversity credits with a lot of queries around them.

In Australia, the government makes it compulsory for companies to buy biodiversity credits to offset damage caused in one area and fund preservation in another. This may be the case with EU firms with new rules forcing them to disclose impacts on nature.

But some industry groups oppose the idea of the credits letting businesses offset destruction elsewhere.

However, negotiators at the COP15 summit focus their talks on the potential voluntary markets in the private sector. They’re not after the compliance markets where biodiversity credits trading is mandatory.

The draft of the COP15 discussion also hinted at the promotion of a related scheme “biodiversity offsets”.

Outside the summit, the World Economic Forum (WEF) and the Biodiversity Credit Alliance are discussing how to set up a voluntary market. They plan to launch it next year with a system that ensures the credits deliver their conservation claims.

Having a high standard in place is critical as a policy officer from a carbon credit platform noted:

“When you can point to many examples in a market of low quality or low standards, it creates distrust and it impacts the integrity of the overall market…”

Other experts caution that biodiversity credits will allow companies to “greenwash,” or make false claims of conserving nature.

But it’s worth emphasizing that biodiversity credits do not replace governments with strict laws prohibiting nature’s degradation. According to Pollination’s CEO, Martijn Wilder, governments must compel companies to invest in biodiversity.

Verra, one of the world’s largest registry of carbon credits, said it will reveal its own standard for biodiversity credits in 2023.

Amazon is testing out its new carbon credit label called ABACUS Verified Carbon Unit (VCU), which goes above and beyond Verra’s methodology and will focus on ensuring additionality, leakage, and durability standards in the market.

Trust has been at the center when dealing with the issues confronting the carbon market. Some buyers of carbon credits are afraid that they will not receive the emissions reduction those credits promise.

Same with other products, there are good and bad carbon credits. The good ones are from projects that result in actual and real removal or avoidance of carbon. The bad ones don’t deliver real and positive impacts.

The challenge for both buyers and sellers is to spot the difference. And this is what the new carbon credit label of Amazon will try to address.

Amazon ABACUS Verified Carbon Unit (VCU)

In partnership with Verra, Amazon unveiled their plan to create a label that they claim to bring a higher standard of producing carbon credits back in July.

The carbon credits the system will generate will satisfy additional standards already required from traditional VCUs. Verra said that ABACUS is the first VCU label that came from a 3rd-party working group.

That group comprises Amazon research scientists and experts at the University of California Berkeley, The Nature Conservancy, and other organizations.

Amazon’s inspiration for creating the ABACUS VCU label is to improve public trust in the environmental integrity of carbon credits. This is critical for the voluntary carbon market to grow.

The architect behind the new carbon credit label, Jamey Mulligan, gave a sneak peek of the Amazon ABACUS VCU. He said:

“It is the first carbon market label that reflects innovations in the carbon accounting itself. [We are] creating an incentive for project developers to road test new project design concepts and carbon quantification methodologies that, at the end of the day, are built to enable confidence that the credits represent what they claim.”

The new carbon credit label will focus on two project types – agroforestry and reforestation. That’s because additionality, leakage, and durability are hard to deal with in those areas. But the projects also have great potential for significant climate, social, and environmental benefits.

Mulligan noted that ABACUS will improve the story for each of those standards. And to qualify for that label, VCUs must come from projects verified by Verra’s afforestation, reforestation, and revegetation (ARR) methodology.

How ABACUS Differs From Traditional Carbon Credits

Additionality:

One way that ABACUS VCUs are different from the existing credits available on the market is how they account for additionality. The label will require project developers to consider additionality at the start of the project.

Rather, they have to track changes in the project’s carbon stock over its lifetime while comparing it continuously to a baseline. This practice uses what they call a dynamic baseline to evaluate additionality.

In Mulligan’s words,

“Essentially, projects have to outcompete matched control plots in the surrounding landscape to maintain additionality. This effectively transfers the risk of future non-additionality, from the atmosphere to where it is today, to project investors, where we think it belongs.”

Leakage:

Another way that Amazon hopes ABACUS VCU will improve the credit standard is on leakage. It happens a lot when agriculture results in indirect land use change and loss of carbon.

ABACUS will prevent that leakage by supporting projects that make the rest of the degraded land or its nearby region equally productive. This will help maintain the agricultural production rate of that location.

The new label believes that carbon removal projects must not come at the expense of food production but must be engines of food security.

Durability:

Lastly, climate solutions through nature have struggled to prove their durability or permanence. This is why buffer pools are created to cover for their potential losses due to wildfire or harvests.

ABACUS crediting will still use the same approach of pooled buffer accounts. But they will be from projects with high quality. And that tree species are better adapted to the project area.

Still on durability, the new scheme will cut down the crediting period from the standard 50 years to only 30.

Ridding of the last 20 years will have little impact on the investors’ financial outlook at the time of investment, said Mulligan. This, in fact, creates unaccredited removals that can compensate for partial losses, acting as another buffer pool.

Testing and Refining ABACUS

Though such changes in carbon crediting scheme sound promising, they need polishing. Amazon and Verra will work together to test and refine the ABACUS VCU label.

Verra completed a pre-consultation last October but ABACUS still needs testing on the ground with real and pilot carbon projects.

Plus, both organizations have to do a lot of work to ensure the success of ABACUS. And the key to that is trust and cultivating it on both sides, according to Mulligan.

A final decision on the proposed label will be due in January 2023.

The rise and fall of countless civilizations are due to access to two things: water and carbon. Both are essential for sustaining flora and fauna.

When arable regions become a desert wasteland, it shifts capital and populations. The world just surpassed 8 million people, and in the next 15 years it is expected to grow by another billion people.

Being able to reverse desertification will unlock new regions for development.

While turning a desert wasteland into a lush green carbon oasis seem like a massive undertaking, it’s already happening across the globe.

First some basics.

Desertification is the long-term degradation of dryland ecosystems by human activities, indirectly through climate change or directly through bad land management or overuse.

+75% of the Earth’s land area is degraded
+90% could become degraded by 2050.
By 2050, the global economy could lose US$23 trillion through land degradation.
Globally, the world loses arable land the size of Saudi Arabia each year.
Climate change is estimated to reduce global crop yields by about 10% by 2050. Parts of Asia and MENA (Middle East and North Africa) could see their crop production cut in half.

Desertification is a causing factor in the early human migration off of Africa. They followed the water and trees, much like the animals did.

Desertification has been identified as one of the top 3 environmental challenges back in 1992.

About 1/3rd of the Earth’s land is covered by desert (as determined by precipitation). All continents have deserts, yet their types and sizes vary widely.

Deserts are frequently among the least populated places on earth since they are thought to have challenging living conditions.

The 5 Largest Deserts Regions In The World

Antarctic & Artic – 10.9 million square miles
MENA Region (Sahara, Arabian, and Syrian deserts) – 4.7 million square miles
North America’s “Big 4” (Great Basin, Mohave, Chihuahuan, and Sonoran) – 0.5 million square miles
Asia’s Gobi – 0.5 million square miles

The biggest non-polar region is the Middle East and Northern Africa (MENA), the host of the largest subtropic deserts in the world – the Sahara.

The Sahara Desert has grown by 10% since 1920, and a third of its current size is due to climate change.

The overall MENA region is divided into the have or have nots – minerals reserves, oil reserves, carbon reserves (vegetation), and water reserves.

The region is surprisingly flush with water resources although it’s deep underground.

The overall volume of “fossil water” is estimated to be over 4 billion barrels. That is over 100 times the annual renewable freshwater resources and 20x the freshwater stored in African lakes.

To get to this will need massive water drilling programs. Libya is building the “Great Man-Made River” the world’s largest underground network of pipes and aqueducts.

To extract this water resource, it needs to be economically viable, and carbon credits help tip the scales.

Water can help turn the deserts back into arable lands, this opens the immense potential for carbon credit generation from all the new greenery.

Carbon credit and biodiversity credits can improve the quality of life (in their region).

How do you control the temperature and climate?

The MENA region was once green and lush, but over time desertification occurred. There only remains a few oases serving as a reminder of the region’s former glory.

Fortunately, turning deserts back into arable regions can happen with proper planning and implementation of technology and nature-based solutions.

To stop the “spreading cancer” known as the Sahara Desert, a massive oasification project is already underway called the “African Great Green Wall”.

It’s an ambitious plan to develop a wide wall of trees to hold back the expanding Sahara Desert.

This 8,000 km natural wonder would cut across the whole continent of Africa from Senegal to Djibouti, affecting 11 countries along the way.

If completed, it would be the largest living structure on the planet. It’s 3x the size of the Great Barrier Reef.

The hope is that the trees will slow soil erosion, slow wind speeds, and help rainwater filter into the ground.

More fertile soils will help communities across the Sahel with land grazing and agriculture.

The African Green Wall hopes to reach its goal by 2030, but with funding drying up and regional disputes, its future remains in limbo.

African Great Green Wall’s execution has not gone as well as planned, with over 80% of the planted trees have died. Researcher Chris Reij stated:

“If all the trees that had been planted in the Sahara since the early 1980s had survived, it would look like Amazonia.”

Another MENA nation that is making major moves towards bringing back arable land is oil-rich Saudi Arabia.

Not too long ago the Middle East was a tropical paradise, and Saudi Arabia is working toward bringing it back to its former glory.

Saudi Arabia is the 9th most powerful nation in the world and one of the most water-scarce nations on the planet.

Surprisingly Saudi Arabia is behind only the U.S. and Canada for per capita water consumption. The Kingdom uses 4 times as much water as it can renew. Plus, it uses 2x the water of an average nation per capita.

Major conservation efforts are at work to protect their other vital resource as water is essential for making the region green again – and to go net zero.

Saudi Arabia has also announced “Vision 2030”, a project to diversify the economy and move away from its dependency on oil.

With the proceeds of their remaining oil, Saudi Arabia is now starting to drill for their next precious resource behind oil – water.

The more water they stockpile the greener their country and economy can be.

The image below looks like an alien crop circle, but these are essentially carbon crop circles.

This “Center Pivot Irrigation” technology was developed in the US and requires less water, resources, and maintenance.

Water is pumped up from underground river channels and aquifers from depths of 1km (0.6 mile).

Each circle will be able to generate carbon credits after the soil begins to take root again and as they begin to store more carbon (and water) in the plants and soil.

To give some context, in 1971, Saudi Arabia had only 3.5 million acres of arable land (0.7% of its total land mass). But in 2020, that ballooned up to 8.5 million acres – that growth is roughly the size of Slovenia.

Yet, they will run out of water underground eventually, so they need new sources of water.

Making Water from the sea and the sky

Constructing dams can capture the rainfall surges from storms to be used later. Countries have also been exploring making their own storms using “Cloud Seeding”.

Cloud seeding works by shooting salt flares into the clouds. As salt naturally attracts water, the water particles collide with others to help with rainfall.

Saudi Arabia is also the world’s biggest user of desalinating plants which turn seawater into freshwater.

They have announced the world’s first Solar Power Desalination Plant. This cutting-edge technology is the most efficient desalination project yet.

Carbon credits are now available for desalination plants that switch to renewable power.

Scientists are even working on creating carbon-negative desalination plants, so they suck up more carbon than they emit.

The concept is to take advantage of the magnesium by-product in the concentrated brine which the desalination plant rejects. This is still in the very experimental stages, but it could show some promise in the future.

Wind & Solar

Using large-scale solar and wind farms can create microclimates.

Large wind farms mix hotter air from above with cooler air below, which brings slightly more initial heat to the ground. The turbines also interrupt the smoothness of the desert wind. This slows the wind speed and traps that heat further.

The trapped heat changes the atmospheric conditions above and can double the typical rainfall (in lab simulations).

The rain helps plants grow, and as they begin to take root, they also provide more green cover. The green cover lowers the amount of sun reflected off the desert surface. And so, it helps bring in more rain.

Solar farms can decrease the amount of sun bounced back into the atmosphere even more.

By combining large-scale solar and wind projects, has the potential to change the local climate.

And Saudi Arabia recently announce they are doubling its investment in renewables.

They are planning massive projects using clean energy such as the world’s biggest solar thermal plant and the region’s largest wind farm.

These initiatives will heat up the ground temperature in the remote agricultural/carbon farm areas. They’ll also produce more rainwater, making it more and more like the lush tropics.

They’re also planning to create a massive climate-controlled futuristic and green megacity called NEOM, in another region of the country. This NEOM project will be carbon neutral and net zero water – more on the NEOM project here.

With the ability to purchase and fund carbon projects across the world, it raised the question “Are local carbon credits better?”.