Bezos, Ikea and Rockefeller promise billions to fight climate change

Global philanthropies have announced a handsome donation, to contribute to fight climate change, on the first full day of the United Nations climate conference.

Plans are underway to create a Global Energy Alliance for People and Planet project that will allow the wealthy governments and people around the world to make progressive and efficient donations toward the energy transition in under-privileged nations, announced the Rockefeller and Ikea foundations on Monday.

The organization includes eight multilateral and development-finance institutions.

According to Bloomberg, it will begin with $10 billion to test strategies and innovative technologies to support renewable energy across the world, especially in areas where private capital still remains hesitant.

They aim to unlock $100 billion in private and public investment to expand them, once prototypes have been proven.

The Bezos Earth Fund plans to donate $500 million to that joint initiative. Simultaneously, the fund has guaranteed $1 billion to restore landscape by planting trees and revival of drying grasslands.

An equal sum will be given to refine food systems by ensuring high-yielding agriculture, at the same time, reducing greenhouse gases.

The programmes were announced on the first full day of the Glasgow, Scotland conference known as COP26.

They intend to augment the pledges made by rich nations back in 2009 to fund the energy transitions of poor nations with $100 billion yearly, reports Bloomberg.  

"Even if rich countries get to $100 billion, it is nowhere close to the trillions that are needed," said Joseph Curtin, director of the power and climate team at Rockefeller.

"We wanted to create the conditions for the private sector to invest at a massive scale," he added.

It is essential to ask who will fund the expenses to amplify the effort required to balance temperatures.

Poor countries claim they require funding to strengthen carbon-cutting ambitions and investment of new technologies to refrain from fossil fuels.

The division of investment is quite evident amidst the Covid-19 pandemic, as rich countries invest trillions to recover losses while poor nations continue to struggle, as reported by Bloomberg.

Countries facing scarcity of energy are now responsible for 24% of global carbon dioxide. Their part of emissions could increase to 76% by 2050 unless they transition from coal, according to an analysis published by the Global Energy Alliance.

Richer nations are set to reach their $100 billion target in 2023, with a three-year delay, according to a report produced by Canada and Germany at the request of COP26 President Alok Sharma.

That result released last week caused many developing nations to be triggered. India, the third-largest producer of carbon dioxide behind China and the US, has said directly that they cannot reach a net-zero goal without more aid.

The Rockefeller-Ikea-Bezos plan is not the only new funding available.

On Monday, UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced an initiative to help developing countries access green technologies to grow their economies without polluting.

The plan includes a doubling of UK aid-funded green investments to more than $4.1 billion over five years, Johnson's office said in a statement.

It can be politically difficult for governments to make big donations to other nations, said Sundaa Bridgett-Jones, who is moving from her role as a managing director at Rockefeller to be chief of new partnerships and advocacy for the Global Energy Alliance.

Further, the mechanism for making such donations isn't particularly nimble. Nations could do it through their own development agencies or through targeted funds at the multilateral institutions such as the World Bank.

"What's been missing is a way to aggregate donations in a way that is agile and flexible," she said. "This provides an easy way to pool smaller donations."

The Rockefeller Foundation, a New York -based philanthropy with more than a century of international experience, has already spent a decade funding 200 solar microgrids to serve remote villages in India.

Once the kinks were worked out, India's Tata Power agreed to expand the project to 10,000 grids. That success drew the attention of the Ikea Foundation, created by the founder of the Swedish furniture giant, which had been separately supporting microgrid work in sub-Saharan Africa. 

Together, they decided to cooperate on an effort that would combine their funds and experience, and allow others to make donations.

In the past few months, they brought on development organizations including the African Development Bank Group, Asian Development Bank, European Investment Bank, Inter-American Development Bank, US International Development Finance Corporation and World Bank, among others.

Bridgett-Jones said the new platform would be a no-fuss place where countries could make more modest donations that wouldn't necessarily count toward fulfilling their 2009 pledges. Italy, for example, has already pledged 10 million euros, she said.

Rockefeller said it would have strict metrics that others can use to measure progress.

Jennifer Layke, global director energy at World Resources Institute, a Washington nonprofit that's not party to the agreement, applauded that.

"We've seen lots of announcements," she said. "We simply don't know if they add up. We need to be confident that we can track implementation."

The Bezos Earth Fund, which is a recently established climate philanthropy of Amazon.com Inc. founder and billionaire Jeff Bezos, was vaguer about how it plans to spend its money.

Besides outlining the two broad focus areas, the foundation said it plans to spend the $2 billion by 2030. That pledge comes in addition to a $1 billion pledge the fund made in September to conserve 30 percent of pristine areas remaining on land and the sea by 2030.

"Our commitment today supports a three-fold imperative — we must conserve what we have, restore what we've lost and grow what we need," Bezos said in a prepared statement.