Amazon announced on June 30 that it has committed to purchase 1.95 million tonnes of carbon removal credits generated over more than a decade by a nature-based restoration programme in South Africa’s Eastern Cape. The programme will plant approximately 180 million spekboom cuttings by the end of 2028 across more than 50,000 hectares of degraded land, restoring the Albany Thicket, a distinctive semi-arid ecosystem found almost exclusively in the Eastern Cape. The project is developed by ecosystem restoration firm Imperative in partnership with carbon project company NatCarbon Africa, and its first phase, 30 million plants across 10,000 hectares, has been underway since April 2024. Amazon’s own purchase price for the credits was not disclosed; what officials quantified instead is the programme’s expected local economic footprint: roughly 11,000 jobs by 2030 and more than $500 million flowing into surrounding communities through wages, procurement, landowner payments and community investment.
Why it matters. Imperative first disclosed the collaboration in April, when it said the project’s second phase had raised $91 million in blended financing, combining a World Bank bond with an offtake deal for an undisclosed quantity of Amazon carbon credits; Amazon’s June 30 announcement revealed the size of that offtake without disclosing its price. The second phase’s financing broke down as a $25 million World Bank bond alongside a $66 million facility from investors Mirova, GenZero, Rubicon Carbon and Bregal Sphere, the same group of investors that had also backed the project’s first phase. Imperative’s chief executive, Scobie Mackay, said Amazon’s anchor demand let the company bring together four institutional streaming capital partners and a World Bank outcome bond within a single financing structure. That sequencing is the real story: a single corporate offtake commitment, not a South African government programme or a straightforward grant, is what unlocked roughly $91 million in restoration financing, illustrating how dependent large-scale African carbon removal projects have become on one or two anchor corporate buyers.
What changes. The project holds an “AA.pre” Standalone Rating from BeZeroCarbon, an independent agency that assesses carbon credit quality, making it one of the highest-rated afforestation, reforestation and revegetation projects in the world, and its credits carry both the ABACUS label and Climate, Community and Biodiversity certification. Fully built out, the project is expected to reach at least 100,000 hectares with a projected yield of 35 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent removed over 40 years, and Amazon has said it will resell credits from the programme through its own carbon credit service to other companies. Locally, the Eastern Cape premier, Oscar Mabuyane, framed the investment at a ribbon-cutting ceremony in Jansenville as proof that environmental restoration can become a genuine driver of economic growth, while Agri Eastern Cape’s president, Peter Cloete, welcomed the jobs it could bring to a region where, in his words, no agriculture generally means no town. The project area is home to 165 recorded plant and animal species, several considered vulnerable by conservationists, tying the restoration’s ecological case directly to its commercial one.
What to watch. The 11,000 jobs and $500 million in local economic value are Amazon’s own projections for 2030, not results delivered yet, and the honest marker of success is whether spending on wages, procurement and landowner payments actually reaches that scale as the remaining 150 million spekboom cuttings go into the ground. The structural question is whether this offtake-anchored financing model, one buyer’s carbon-credit commitment unlocking a bond and a syndicate of impact investors, can be repeated for other African restoration projects without another Amazon-sized buyer willing to go first, or whether Spekboom becomes the exception that proves how thin the market for African nature-based carbon removal still is beneath the headline numbers.