At Conservation International’s glitzy annual gala in New York, with Harrison Ford, Jacinda Ardern and Shailene Woodley looking on, the couple were given the global visionary award for the financial contribution of the Bezos Earth Fund to the natural world.

“Jeff and Lauren are making history, not just with the sum of their investment in nature but also the speed of it,” said the Conservation International CEO, Dr M Sanjayan, whose organisation received a $20m grant from Bezos in 2021 for its work in the tropical Andes.

Launched with a skeleton team in February 2020, the Bezos Earth Fund aims to give away $10bn (£7.9bn) of the Amazon founder’s $200bn personal fortune to combat the climate crisis and biodiversity loss by the end of the decade.

With many leading companies struggling to make good on ambitious net zero targets, supporters of carbon markets argue that allowing firms to buy offsets in the short term could help funnel billions of dollars to initiatives to protect rainforest, renewable energy and other decarbonisation schemes while benefiting biodiversity and local communities.

There is a real risk that excessively pro-market funding leads to drowning out more critical voices which provide the necessary counterbalance to the debate,” says Sam Van den plas, a policy director at the NGO Carbon Market Watch.

Kaya Axelsson, a research fellow at Oxford Net Zero, who is among 32 academics who signed a letter in Nature arguing against the SBTi announcement, says that the organisation’s independence is vital for highlighting where real environmental action is taking place.

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