Amazon is backing a large scale project to plant 180 million spekboom shrubs in South Africa's Eastern Cape. The plant is known for its ability to store carbon in soil and pull CO2 from the air. The project aims to restore degraded land and generate nature based carbon removal credits. Amazon has committed to buying 1.95 million tonnes of these credits, which gives the project a guaranteed buyer from the start. That removes a lot of the financial risk that usually kills these kinds of restoration efforts before they get off the ground. The project is expected to create around 11,000 jobs by 2030 and bring over R8 billion in economic value to local communities. An environmental lawyer quoted in the article points out that tech companies are increasingly funding these nature based offsets because of the energy demands from AI and data centers. The article explains how carbon removal credits work and why having a committed buyer like Amazon matters for project viability. It is a concrete example of corporate climate finance tied to real land restoration and carbon removal.
