The largest climate charity on Earth has donated $24.5 million to conserve coastal ecosystems as a geographic plan to establish the initial multinational marine biosphere reserve on Earth, its leader of nature informed Reuters.
The Bezos Earth Fund has four grants, which are designed to support local communities and organisations in the protection of marine essential sites in Costa Rica, Panama, Colombia, and Ecuador.
The grants are part of a plan to extend one billion dollars to the world target to save 30 percent of the land and water on the planet by 2030. The collective of donors, as part of the 10 other philanthropies in the Protecting our planet challenge, is targeting to give out 5 billion dollars within the same period.
Thus far, the Bezos Earth Fund has implemented close to 700 million dollars, and the larger coalition close to 3 billion dollars, for a total of 5 billion dollars.
The largest of the new grants announced is of $13.85 million that would be awarded to an organisation known as Re: wild to assist the partners in establishing and enhancing coastal reserves and nursery areas for turtles and other sea creatures like hammerhead sharks.
The head of nature at the Bezos Earth Fund, Cristian Samper, called it an incredibly important area of migration of species. “The sole manner that you can secure this area is by doing it in a transboundary manner.”
By year two, the four countries had expanded the size of the formerly safeguarded seas to over 600,000 square kilometres (231,660 square miles) in 10 different regions, and he said that the goal now was to establish one biosphere reserve.
That, Samper said, “would be the first in the world, and that the Fund was also negotiating a similar reserve in the Pacific, five times the size of the continental United States.”
The fund has committed to allocating $100 million to assist the Pacific region in putting in place the global biodiversity objective and will declare a second tranche of grants in 2026.
“As far as the needle is concerned, and you have to move it by 30 at a time, this is the kind of work you have to do.”
