Amazon Founder and CEO Jeff Bezos has just given the largest single donation a think tank has ever received, with $100 million going to the World Resources Institute (WRI) based in Washington, DC.
Here is more from the Washington Post:
Jeff Bezos said Monday he is giving $791 million to 16 groups fighting
climate change, the first grants from his Earth Fund, saying the money
is “just the beginning of my $10 billion commitment to fund scientists,
activists, NGOs, and others."
More than half of the donations went to established environmental
groups, with $100 million donations each going to the Environmental
Defense Fund, the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Nature
Conservancy, the World Resources Institute and the World Wildlife Fund.
Leaders of the groups receiving funds said they met earlier this year
with Bezos and his partner Lauren Sánchez to discuss what they would do
with the grants. Bezos has a small team, including from his personal
office, helping to figure out how to parcel out the funds, they said. He
will likely hire more people to assist with the Earth Fund.
The World Resources Institute, which will receive $100 million over five
years, said it will use the money for two major initiatives. This first
is to develop a new satellite-powered land-use and carbon-emissions
monitoring system to measure the impact of conservation and restoration
of forests, grasslands, wetlands and agricultural lands on reducing
emissions. The other project will try to spur the electrification of
school buses, with a goal of converting more than 450,000 to
zero-emissions vehicles by 2030, the organization said.
Here is a press release from WRI, which was established in 1982 with funding from the MacArthur Foundation.
Although not as well known as other think tanks, such as the Brookings Institution and the Heritage Foundation, WRI has fairly hefty annual revenues: $132 million according to the latest disclosure in 2019.
WRI donors include: Asian Development Bank (ADB), Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Bloomberg Philanthropies, Cargill Inc., Citi Foundation, FedEx Corp., Ford Foundation, IKEA Foundation, National Geographic Society, PepsiCo, Inc., Google Inc., 3M, eBay, General Motors, Goldman Sachs, Hershey, Mars Inc., Shell, Target, Walt Disney, Pfizer, Bank of America, Microsoft, Shell Foundation, UPS Foundation, Walmart Foundation, USAID, FDA, and US Department of State.
The governments of Australia, Ireland, UK, Sweden, Poland, Luxembourg, Switzerland, Germany, France, Denmark, Norway and the Netherlands are also donors.
While colleges and universities have received $100+ million gifts, it is the first time any think tank has received that amount.