South Africa’s new gold rush: Spekboom restoration speeds up, but it’s a bumpy road, insiders report

Restoration teams in South Africa's Eastern Cape are hand-planting spekboom cuttings across degraded farmland once stripped bare by mohair goat grazing, hoping to revive the Albany thicket ecosystem across 1.5 million hectares. The work is funded through carbon markets, with investors betting on future carbon credit earnings once the plants and soil bank enough atmospheric carbon.

The World Bank has backed the sector with a $120 million bond, and Singapore-based Imperative Global Solutions is scaling what had been artisanal planting into an industrial operation. Hive Ecosystems alone aims to plant 5,431 hectares, at a cost of 9-21 cents per cutting, with success determined largely by careful, patient handling in the ground.

Over 300 million spekboom plants are expected to be planted across all projects over the next four winter seasons. Whether the ecosystem recovers, whether carbon credits materialize, and whether investors get paid all hinge on outcomes that won't be clear for years.

The full dispatch is available from the source below.