Jeff Bezos, the Chief Executive Officer of Amazon, the largest online retailer in the US and the second largest in the world, will commit $10 billion to fund scientists, activists, nonprofits and other groups fighting to counter the effects of climate change, as announced earlier in February. The Bezos Earth Fund will begin issuing grants this summer as part of the initiative.
The news come after a great deal of criticism against the company concerning its massive transportation footprint.
Climate change is the biggest threat to our planet. I want to work alongside others both to amplify known ways and to explore new ways of fighting the devastating impact of climate change on this planet we all share,
…Bezos said in a post in social media.
Bezos is occasionally named the world’s richest person, on and off, varying between the first and the second place depending on what day you are doing the calculations. Reports say this funding constitutes almost 8% of his fortune.
This follows several commitments made by the company in recent months.
In 2019, Amazon announced its ‘Shipment Zero’ ambition, an initiative to make every Amazon shipment net zero carbon, with half of all shipments achieving net zero carbon by 2030.
Shipment Zero means that the fulfillment operations the company undertakes to deliver a customer shipment are net zero carbon—from the fulfillment center where an item is picked off the shelf, to the materials used to package the item, and the vehicles that transport the package to the customer’s door.
With improvements in electric vehicles, aviation bio fuels, reusable packaging, and renewable energy, for the first time we can now see a path to net zero carbon delivery of shipments to customers, and we are setting an ambitious goal for ourselves to reach 50% of all Amazon shipments with net zero carbon by 2030,
…the company said.
However, the plans announced include packages transported in zero-emissions delivery vehicles, such as one of Amazon’s 100,000 newly ordered electric delivery vehicles, but it is yet unclear if the ambition includes ships.
It is also unclear whether the company’s goal applies only to items Amazon sells itself or also the items shipped by third-party sellers through the platform.
It won’t be easy to achieve this goal, but it’s worth being focused and stubborn on this vision and we’re committed to seeing it through
…an Amazon blog post reads.
In addition, in September, Amazon announced The Climate Pledge, a commitment to meet the Paris Agreement 10 years early, becoming the first signatory of this pledge.
The Climate Pledge calls on signatories to:
- Measure and report greenhouse gas emissions on a regular basis;
- Implement decarbonization strategies in line with the Paris Agreement through real business changes and innovations, including efficiency improvements, renewable energy, materials reductions, and other carbon emission elimination strategies;
- Neutralize any remaining emissions with additional, quantifiable, real, permanent, and socially-beneficial offsets to achieve net zero annual carbon emissions by 2040.
