$5 Billion Conservation Effort Promises a New Approach but Faces Hurdles

Last week’s pledge by nine grant makers 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 work differently than they have traditionally.

The announcement of what the grant makers are calling the “Protecting Our Planet Challenge” was designed to help jump-start support for the global effort, dubbed 30x30, to protect 30 percent of the land and 30 percent of oceans by 2030 that 72 countries have has 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.

When Jeff Bezos announced the Bezos Earth Fund’s $1 billion contribution to this effort at an event in New York last week, he was very critical of previous conservation efforts.

Dimitrios Kambouris, Getty Images for Bezos Earth Fund

“Many conservation efforts have failed in the past. They haven’t delivered. Top-down programs, they fail to include communities — they fail to include Indigenous peoples that live in the local area,” he said. “We won’t make those same mistakes. 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 communities in 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 vast biodiversity. Today there are very few areas left where people don’t live, says James Deutsch, CEO of the Rainforest Trust.

“Most of the protected areas that are created going forward will be all or partly owned and all or partly managed by local people or Indigenous people, which is a very positive development,” he says.

Working With Indigenous Communities

Supporting local and Indigenous communities in their effort to gain legal title to their lands and to enable them to manage and protect them in remote areas around the world is no simple task, particularly on such a scale. Sometimes these groups do not have legal entities required to receive grants, they may be hard to contact and work with, there may be cultural and language barriers. Working with organizations that already have ties to these places that can distribute funds to the most effective groups can help. But there has to be a way to make sure that groups in the middle don’t take too much funding away from those on the ground, says Brian O’Donnell, director of the Campaign for Nature, which advocates for the “30x30" goal.

The Wildlife Conservation Society, like many other big groups, has experience working in some places with Indigenous groups and it has shifted its conservation efforts to those that include local and Indigenous residents, says the group’s CEO Cristián Samper. But even that level of expertise will not be enough, he says. New Indigenous organizations that know and understand local leaders and communities may be needed to help disburse that money effectively. Indeed, the Earth Fund will be looking to work with groups like that.

“The most important things in the world that need doing cannot be done by large organizations. They will be done by many, sometimes hundreds, sometimes even thousands of smaller groups,” says Andrew Steer, CEO of the Bezos Earth Fund. “Some form of intermediation is the most efficient way of doing it.”

Bezos Earth Fund

O’Donnell says philanthropic groups may need to reconsider some of their basic tenets and accept more risk. “Much of the world’s biodiversity is concentrated in places that can be difficult to work in. Some are in war zones. Some are in places with unstable governments. Some are in places that have levels of government corruption. But if we just took all of those places off the table, some of the most nature-rich places on the planet would be off-limits to philanthropy. And if that happened, we would lose some of the most incredible places on the planet,” O’Donnell says. “It’s going to take a culture shift within philanthropy.”

The Earth Fund plans to make that culture shift, says Steer. “Philanthropy can and should take big, calculated risks because those will be necessary if we’re going to win the battle,” he says. But there also needs to be accountability and a willingness to learn from failures. “The dollars that they put in are very valuable dollars. We need to use them extremely wisely. And we will need to take some risks.”

Not New to Some Grant Makers

Some of the grant makers involved in this announcement have already been taking this approach to conservation. The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation has been supporting Indigenous communities in the Andes-Amazon region for some time. And when fires raged across the Amazon, many of the areas that it supported that were managed by Indigenous communities fared better than the surrounding areas, according to Aileen Lee, the program officer in charge of the foundation’s Environmental Conservation Program. Conservation is important, not just for biodiversity and for an area’s ability to store carbon but also to bolster its ability to be resilient in the face of climate change. And working with Indigenous groups has been very effective.

She wrote in an email that the foundation expects to continue to support Indigenous communities. “My hope is that we will engage these groups with respect and humility and in a manner that recognizes the wisdom that comes from their having lived in harmony with nature for many millennia.”

Bloomberg Philanthropies already works closely with local governments and Indigenous communities on its efforts to help conserve ocean ecosystems, says Melissa Wright, who leads Bloomberg’s Vibrant Oceans Initiative. It collaborated with mayors and other local leaders in Brazil, Indonesia, Micronesia, the Philippines, and other places. The foundation helps with data tracking and scientific research and helps with policy development so these communities can establish marine protections. It has sponsored work by an Indigenous researcher who is trying to institutionalize the way that native Polynesians have traditionally managed their marine environments. The foundation has not announced how much it is contributing to the current conservation effort.

Foundations Working Together

The Wildlife Conservation Society helped bring together the donors and helped facilitate conversations about the need to make a big announcement about conservation and climate change, says Samper, the group’s CEO. Right now it is not entirely clear how these grant makers will coordinate their efforts. The group came together somewhat hastily. Conversations started last spring, but most of the group joined in the last month or two, says the Rainforest Trust’s Deutsch. “I think it’s an open question how we will work together going forward,” he says.

Despite the historic size of the announcement, much more funding is needed to meet this ambitious goal. According to a study by Cambridge University researchers and Campaign for Nature, if 30 percent of the land and seas are conserved, it will cost $140 billion a year to effectively manage those areas. Right now governments spend about $24 billion managing protected areas, mostly in the United States and Canada, says O’Donnell. Very little is spent in the world’s rainforests, where much of the biodiversity is and where much of the world’s carbon is stored.

“The announcement was a good start from the philanthropic sector, really stepping forward on this. But it’s only one piece of the pie,” he says. “Much more needs to be done from government and also the corporate sector.”

Just last week the European Union announced that it would double its funding for biodiversity. In the few days since the announcement, the Earth Fund’s Steer says that he has had conversations with government officials and leaders who are showing interest in conservation, which can be a tough topic since there have been so many setbacks.

“The idea is to sort of create this tone of wow, actually, there are people that really care about this that are going out on a limb and are going the extra mile to put in serious resources. Maybe there is a way forward,” he says. And that can help push governments and corporations to commit funding.

More Ambitious Targets

This is not the first big conservation pledge. In 2018 a group of foundations pledged $500 million — just 10 percent as much as this newest announcement — to conservation efforts, and others have come before that, says Leila Salazar-López, executive director of Amazon Watch, a group that funds Indigenous communities in the Amazon Rainforest. And she says the organizations she works with did not receive funds from earlier announcements.

She also notes that representatives from Coordinator of the Indigenous Organisations of the Amazon Basin, or Coica, a federation of Indigenous people living in the Amazon, have called for much more ambitious targets than conserving 30 percent of natural areas by 2030. They want 80 percent of the Amazon to be conserved by 2025, based on scientific concerns about the Amazon soon reaching a tipping point when the entire ecosystem could collapse if the rainforest continues to be destroyed. In October the International Union for Conservation of Nature also adopted this position.

The Wildlife Conservation Society supports this effort, too, says Samper, citing the importance of Indigenous territories throughout the Amazon. “We welcome the idea of increased ambition,” he says.

Salazar-López agrees that philanthropy has shifted its approach to conservation and has recognized that many of its past approaches have failed.

“It is time for direct investment in Indigenous people’s territories, in their land conservation, in their forest management, in their life plans,” she says. “I hope that this pledge of $5 billion for conservation will go to the places that need it most. And to the people that need it most.”