South Africa’s new gold rush: Big promises, closed books in new carbon frontier

Mongabay's investigation examines a World Bank-backed bond funding spekboom restoration across South Africa's Albany thicket biome, where a $120 million pool aims to repair land degraded by decades of overgrazing. The first project drawing on the fund expects to bring roughly $500 million into a farming community over 40 years through wages, rent, carbon credit revenue and small business development, with Amazon's purchase of credits cited as a factor that drew other financiers in.

The report ties this expansion to the 2023 Lake Kariba scandal, in which a Zimbabwe forest conservation project spanning more than 700,000 hectares was found to have fabricated more than half of its 27 million claimed carbon credits. The fallout reached South Africa when carbon broker South Pole quietly shut down its own nearby spekboom project, leaving jobs and hectares abandoned; some of its orphaned plants were later rescued by a competing restoration effort.

The investigation frames the broader sector as dominated by international corporations whose investment promises are difficult for outsiders to verify, raising questions about accountability if newer, larger projects underperform or collapse.

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