Amazon to buy half the carbon credits from Bacon Tree project

Jan

Jan

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Amazon in R1.98-billion deal involving 180 million of a unique shrub in South Africa

Amazon said it will buy just less than half of the carbon credits to be generated by a project to restore degraded land in South Africa by planting thickets of Spekboom, a plant that sequesters carbon dioxide and helps soil retain water.

The company has committed to purchase 1.95 million carbon credits at a fixed price over more than a decade and will then onsell them to its own business units, suppliers and other parties to help them offset their emissions.
 
I don’t think this is what environmentalists had in mind.
Capitalisms always finds loopholes to fast track our destruction
 
They must make sure that grazing does not occur, or all that carbon will be released again. The reason we need to plant the stuff again is that animals love it and overgrazing occurred in the past.
 
I doubt just planning spekboom will work. And it won't do anything to help with CO2, but it's not like I don't think investing in this type of thing is a bad thing.

A more careful analysis of the problem isn't just overgrazing. The plants need a certain amount of animal traffic to break up the hard soil and poo in it. That was what herds of springbok effectively did in the past. They would go over an area and effectively till and fertilise the soil.


What he came up with was a theory he called Holistic Management, or as he saw it, a way to reverse the desertification and land degradation that affects two thirds of the planet’s landmass, to absorb carbon and reverse climate change, to store groundwater in arid regions, to restore the earth while at the same time securing food supplies and generating fair incomes.

The spellbound audience present at the TEDTalk gave him a standing ovation. The method he proposed?

“The only option was to do the unthinkable, to use livestock, bunched and moving as a proxy for the former wild herds and predators, and mimic Nature.”

As Savory, Acocks and others would prove time and again, putting livestock put onto degraded land at high densities for a short amount of time (typically three to eight days) can transform it with startlingly rapidity. Within weeks of subjecting the earth to this intense high consumption, high fertilisation and trampling, the seeds and bossies start to grow, especially if there are good rains. The trampled crust is softened and transformed. Flattened plants act as mulch and seedling nurseries.


It is no accident that the bacteria in the soil (which are critical to its health) are related to the bacteria in the guts of grazing animals. The roots trap carbon in the subterranean levels of the earth and provide pathways to absorb water. Even if those grass roots die in a year or two, their prolific root system containing all the carbon remains underground where it can do the most good, removed from the atmosphere.
Click to expand...
https://karoospace.co.za/guardians-of-the-karoo-rangelands/

Getting a bunch of wagies to grow and plant spekboom by hand sounds good on paper, but doesn't address the underlying problems.
 
HocusPocusFM said:
;) The "bacon tree" generally refers to the Spekboom (Portulacaria afra), a hardy succulent native to South Africa.
Click to expand...
I know of very few English people that refer to it as a Bacon tree. Most speak of an Elephants foot, or even porkbush. Bacon tree sounds like something oom Jan vannie plaas would say :p
 
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