CROP DOLLAR: Is SA’s novel spekboom restoration a new soil carbon-farming frontier?

There are some forlorn-looking former ostrich camps in what is now the Kwandwe Private Game Reserve that have become a poster child for the repair of badly damaged farmlands in the Eastern Cape. Decades of ostrich and small-stock farming have stripped them to the hide. Where once there was impenetrable bush, today they may as well be a parking lot. 

Even after 25 years of rest, the hard-packed ground has shown little sign of natural recovery, according to Kwandwe environment manager Craig Sholto-Douglas.

Fifteen years ago, though, the reserve’s ecologist popped a bunch of spekboom cuttings into one camp. The experiment was low-tech, and low-cost: harvested nearby from wild-growing spekboom in a healthy thicket; sprigs, not much thicker than a finger, planted without roots; left to fend for themselves. 

It didn’t take long for the plants to settle in.

The aim was to test a notion that had long been germinating within the Albany thicket ecology community: could mass-planting with this tough, drought-tolerant succulent help exhausted farmlands heal?

“The spekboom’s done really well,” says Sholto-Douglas, who regularly updates the thicket community on the camp’s progress. “We’re starting to see saplings and germinated seedlings of things like jacket plums and other woody species that are naturally starting to come back now that the microclimate’s changed.”

It is this potential to repair even the most damaged lands in thicket country, not its ostensible heft for mopping up atmospheric carbon, that has the plant in the news this year. 

For two decades, ecologists have been building a business case for how to pay for thicket repair, by drawing on the carbon markets. If the mass-planting of spekboom can kick-start a process that will allow the rest of the plant community to recover under its own steam, and if ecologists can show how much atmospheric carbon the regrowing thicket will draw from the atmosphere as it repairs, can landowners trade this for credits on the carbon markets?

This is a hyper-local model for ecosystem repair at scale. Spekboom-led restoration can only be used in this biome, one which covers just 2.4% of the country, and it only applies in parts of the thicket community where spekboom grows naturally, and yet it has drawn Global North attention. 

Earlier this year, the World Bank listed an outcome-based bond valued at $120-million for projects doing spekboom-led thicket recovery, and named the bond after the plucky succulent. A new entrant to the sector, Singapore-based developer Imperative Global Solutions Pte Ltd, is the first corporation to benefit, drawing $25-million from the bond, and securing another $66-million in loans from other financiers. Tech giant Amazon has agreed to buy the first crop of carbon from Imperative’s new plantings. 

Until now, Spekboom projects have been artisanal, aiming for about 5,500 hectares or less of restored lands. Imperative’s target is to plant cuttings across 100,000ha in the next four or five years. It estimates that the first 60,000ha will bring $500-million into the moribund farming economy in the next four decades. 

Does this hyper-local case mark a new era for African agriculture, where cultivating soil carbon through ecosystem repair – including in bigger plant communities, such as grasslands, savanna or mangroves – replaces conventional crop yields?

[Read more about the business case for using Global North funding and the carbon markets to pay for spekboom-led thicket restoration.]

From mohair to carbon: a hyper-local pivot with global implications  

The locals say that spekboom is to goats what ice cream is to a toddler. Their plush, water-laden leaves are quite irresistible. This explains why decades of livestock farming – mostly with mohair-producing goats – have left 90% of the plant community in various states of disrepair. Some, like the Kwandwe ostrich camps, so severely that they’re good for nothing. 

But today, when Sholto-Douglas digs around at the bole of a spekboom planted in the experimental camp 15 years back – the cutting has matured into a sturdy shoulder-height spray of branches – he lifts out a handful of airy dark soil mixed with a confetti of dried leaves.  

This is where spekboom’s magic lies. As its canopy spreads over damaged ground, it protects against rain that can hammer the exposed surface to a cement-like crust, or strip topsoil. It gives relief from direct sun that can bake the ground to temperatures approaching 60°C. Water filtration can return. As the canopy sheds leaves, the dying plant matter recharges depleted nutrients and creates mulch as a home for other plants and animals. 

The spekboom canopy, and its distinctive skirt of low-growing branches that drop roots and quickly spread across the ground, creates a nursery environment that should allow the wider plant community to partially return, given enough time. 

Every metric ton of carbon dioxide (t CO2e) the land draws from the air is equivalent to one carbon credit. If landowners can show how much carbon their recovering thickets can clean from the atmosphere, they can exchange those for credits which they can sell at the going rate on the carbon market. 

Where farmers can no longer run livestock, pivoting to this new crop – carbon – could be a lifeline, even for operations like Kwandwe, which is interested in ecosystem repair for ecotourism rather than conventional farming.   

And this funding model doesn’t only apply to farmers in Albany thicket country. 

Forests are usually held up as the exemplar of nature-based carbon sinks, with their above-ground plant mass and root systems locking carbon away for decades or centuries. Indigenous forests are one of South Africa’s nine biomes. But these are fragmented patches and, according to the South African National Biodiversity Institute (Sanbi), only cover 0.25% of the country’s total area. Their contribution to the country’s land-based carbon bank is almost negligible – so small that in Sanbi’s 2020 National Terrestrial Carbon Sinks Assessment it’s rounded off to 0%.

Even Albany thicket only stores about 4% of the country’s land-based organic carbon.

Grasslands cover 30% of the country, with the carbon sink atlas estimating that the biome stores 36% of the country’s organic carbon. Savannas cover 46% of the country and bank away 31% of the organic carbon. 

Soils, in the end, are the power brokers here, stashing 89% of the country’s land-based organic carbon. 

Any investment in healthy soils – across all biomes, using locally appropriate methods – will be an investment in climate stability and other ecosystem services that keep society and the economy ticking over, such as water regulation, grazing or biodiversity. Projects aimed at conserving existing biomes, or repairing badly degraded ones, can be funded through carbon markets. Some already are. 

Read more about the need for transparency in project implementation.

What are Imperative and Amazon promising the Eastern Cape community? 

But in the alchemy of invisible carbon dioxide exchanging for the novel currency of carbon credits, how many rands and cents will eventually materialise in the pockets of people on the ground in Albany thicket country, or other biomes should soil carbon become the new crop? 

Earlier this year, Imperative – a privately held company which bills itself as an infrastructure developer, albeit one that specialises in ecosystem repair rather than dams or bridges – announced it had secured $91 million in loans, allowing it to increase its pilot plantings five times over. 

Together, these initial 60,000ha are expected to clean up 24.9 metric tons of atmospheric carbon in the next four decades, and bring $500-million into the local economy. This will be in the form of wages, credit revenue shares with farmers, taxes and investment in small business development, according to Imperative CEO Scobie Mackay. Earnings from the first credits should start trickling in as soon as 2027 or 2028. Amazon is teed up to buy 1.95 million carbon credits from the first half of the Imperative plantings: 9.4% of the total 20.8 million carbon credits expected to be generated by 50,000ha.  

Imperative will not disclose the estimated price it expects for its carbon credits, though, and neither Imperative nor Amazon would disclose what price they have agreed to in their deal. It is also difficult to independently verify figures provided by either company or those put out in their press releases. Both are tight-lipped about the details of their contract, and many of Imperative’s partners are locked into non-disclosure agreements.

Imperative’s income, and what flows to the community, will depend first on how much carbon dioxide the recovering landscape is able to draw down, something which thicket ecologists warn may not measure up to what projects are basing their business models on. Imperative is banking on a draw-down of 10.4 t CO2e per hectare per year, and a total of 41.6 million locked away over the full 100,000ha over four decades. Most of the smaller projects are aiming for more modest estimates of between 4.6 and 8.5 t CO2e per hectare per year.

There is a range of prices for nature-based credits in the category geared towards reforestation and revegetation, and it depends on what benefits a project offers. Forestry plantations that are limited to a single-species monocrop are bargain basement: these were selling for about $14 in 2025, according to the World Bank. Projects that bring climate benefits along with habitat repair, which is how spekboom projects are pitched, have a higher value. The data provider and analytics firm MSCI Carbon Markets, with which Imperative is a signed-up client, estimates that the most likely price point for these spekboom-derived credits on today’s market is $45. 

Meanwhile, a well-positioned industry adviser who asked not to be named estimates that most projects are working on a value of $20 to $25 a credit.

Based on this, Amazon’s final bill for the 1.95 million carbon credits could be anything from $39-million at the lower range of $20, to $87.75-million at $45 a credit. 

How much of this reaches farmers also depends on the revenue share agreement between Imperative and landowners, which Imperative wouldn’t disclose. 

Read more about the details of Amazon’s purchase agreement, and the implications of the dominance of international corporations in this emerging ecosystem restoration sector.

Power brokers and gatekeepers 

It isn’t simple, though, for a floundering mohair farmer to pivot to selling a harvest of soil carbon. It’s not a matter of merely selling off the goat herd and buying seeds for another crop, such as maize or potatoes. Trading in carbon credits requires complicated and expensive registration with one of the industry’s certification bodies – Verra, for instance, or Gold Standard – and satisfying the demands of the often opaque red tape. Daily Maverick spoke extensively with ecologists, industry consultants and project staff implementing spekboom projects, who all confirmed this as a significant barrier to entry.

Once a landowner is certified they must measure changes in the land’s carbon stocks using one of the industry’s verified methods. These figures are audited by independent consultants, a process that can cost as much as $100,000 per audit. This may be affordable for industrial-sized operations, who can benefit from economies of scale, and may be able to audit annually, and claim immediate returns. But what of the land owner with just 5,000ha?

Planting spekboom en masse into exhausted Eastern Cape farmlands wasn’t conceived because of the plant’s supposed atmospheric carbon drawdown potential – a common piece of folklore. Nor was it intended to meet the country’s Net Zero goals. Now that this niche and emerging sector has won the support of powerful Global North financiers and developers, the case of the humble spekboom puts a spotlight on who holds the power in North-South carbon trading, who doesn’t, and why ecologists in this nook of Africa are calling for transparency and accountability in a rapidly changing world. DM

This is the final article in a five-part investigation into spekboom-led ecosystem restoration in South Africa, paid by the carbon markets. It is produced by Story Ark, an award-winning collaboration between independent science writer Leonie Joubert, the Stellenbosch University School for Climate Studies, and the Henry Nxumalo Foundation which supports investigative journalism in Africa. Read parts one, two, and three.