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Steer said last month on Cleaning Up, a podcast about the energy transition, that the fund had paid out $2.5bn so far, in part to help professionalise climate bodies.
Climate action is more about installing solar/renewables rather than getting “climate bodies” to pat you on the back. It’s not necessarily bad news if Earth Fund spends on renewables instead of climate bodies/SBTI. It sounds as though SBTI had correct reservations about “carbon credits” approach to action and weren’t patting enough backs as quid pro quo for funding, which is also good.
SBTI has a good but very rigid framework, generally opposed to taking the cheap way out. I suspect a lot if big businesses are going to start pulling out when the bill comes due on their environmental commitments and they haven’t actually invested in cleaning up their assets.
Also, don’t love the pyramid scheme that is “supplier engagement targets” - Basically you don’t need to reduce your supply chain emissions as long as your suppliers sign up for their own science based targets. Those suppliers ARE gonna drop the ball, en masse, leaving these big companies to just shrug and go “not our fault they failed”.