The Species Recovery Alliance was announced Oct. 16 at the Leaders' Summit of COP17 in Yerevan, Armenia. The Bezos Earth Fund is one of nine founding members of the initiative, which aims to provide reliable, long-term funding for conservation work that often struggles with inconsistent support.
"We know how to bring species back from the brink," Cristián Samper, managing director of the Bezos Earth Fund, said in a statement. "What too many conservation teams lack is reliable funding to keep that work going. Rebuilding a population can take years, and a break in support can put hard-won progress at risk."
The other founding members are Leonardo DiCaprio's 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. Each member will direct its own grants while coordinating with the alliance. The group will measure progress using the IUCN Red List and Green Status of Species.
The alliance builds on the Phoenix Species Project, a $200 million partnership between the Earth Fund and Re:wild launched in August that aims to recover 100 critically endangered and extinct-in-the-wild species across 30 countries. "Kids fall in love with animals before anyone tells them those animals are disappearing," Lauren Sánchez Bezos said in a statement at the project's launch.
The commitment comes as governments lag behind their own nature funding goals. At the 2022 Montreal biodiversity summit, countries pledged to raise $200 billion a year for biodiversity by 2030. Data from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, cited by the Associated Press, shows countries raised between $75 billion and $92 billion annually from 2023 through 2025, less than half that target. A UN progress report found fewer than half of national biodiversity targets are on track.
"We're not moving fast enough," Astrid Schomaker, executive secretary of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity, told the AP. Alongside the private alliance, 17 governments led by Colombia and Armenia launched the Coalition of Action to Recover Endangered Species. Samper called it an encouraging expression of ambition but stressed that sustained public funding is essential to achieving recovery at scale.
The Bezos Earth Fund was established in 2020 with a $10 billion pledge to fight climate change and protect nature, the largest individual philanthropic commitment of its kind. A fund spokesperson confirmed to Fortune that $2.4 billion has been granted to date, leaving more than $7 billion to distribute before the fund's 2030 target deadline.