Category: Story Ark

Key messages:

• The drought-adapted succulent spekboom has long been trumpeted as the crown prince of South Africa’s nature-based carbon sink solutions.
• The World Bank ensured its coronation with a $120 million outcome-based bond, structured and named in its honor.
• According to Amazon, the tech giant’s commitment to buy carbon credits from the first developer to draw on the bond gave other financiers the confidence to back the industrial-scale project. Does this make the tech giant the power behind the throne of an emerging nature-based carbon credit sector?
• Our investigation uncovers a sector dominated by international corporations whose investment promises are hard to scrutinize, in a cautionary tale of what happens when projects fail. 

Browsed. Heavily browsed. Knackered. This farm camp is well on the knackered side of the degradation scale, threadbare after decades of heavy livestock pressure. But the single shrub at Nick Hamp-Adam’s feet may help change that. It just needs a second chance. 

This young spekboom plant (Portulacaria afra) is more stocky shrub than rooted cutting. It’s had more time than usual in the nursery to bulk up ahead of being released into the wild. But for the moment, it’s stricken on its side, roots exposed. 

Hamp-Adams, general manager for Return to Thicket, one of the smaller restoration projects in this nook of South Africa’s Eastern Cape province, is about to set things right. He sinks to his knees, finds a hand-sized stone and begins reopening the original planting hole. 

“Kudu, most likely …”

His breath is metered by his efforts with the digging tool.

“… came through …”

Strike. 

“… grabbed it …”

Strike.

“… probably wasn’t planted deep enough.”

Strike. 

He’s gentle when he rights the plant, taking care as he tamps the soil around its roots. Tough plants, generally. Don’t need much coddling. Except during planting. Treat them like babies during planting. 

This individual is one of thousands of cuttings of this drought-tolerant endemic succulent that are being popped into the ground across 2,100 hectares (5,200 acres) of exhausted farmland recently purchased by Return to Thicket. As the vegetation regrows, it’s expected to draw the equivalent of 10.3 metric tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere per hectare per year over the course of three decades. That’s the equivalent emissions from nearly four round-trip flights for a single person between London and New York. 

But that’s not what makes this particular shrub noteworthy. This plant, and the countless others around the camp, were rescued from another thicket restoration project in the area, one that closed down a few years back when its international backer pulled out. 

It’s a cautionary tale of what happens when developers, carbon market control bodies and financiers aren’t transparent in their operations or open to public scrutiny.

Examining this novel kind of industrial-scale development — ecosystem repair funded by carbon markets — has become particularly relevant now. The World Bank has created an outcome-based bond tailored specifically to help fund restoration projects working to repair Albany thicket, a small but important biome in South Africa where spekboom grows naturally and where its mass planting is expected to help heal degraded farmlands. 

The thicket biome is a small plant community, covering only 1.71 million hectares (about 4.2 million acres) and making up just 2.4% of the country’s total footprint. Yet this niche bond recognizes the need for a fund that’s specifically structured to restore the 90% of the biome that’s partially or badly degraded. Where there once was impenetrable hedge-like thicket, many places have been reduced to near desert. The most likely way to repair the region is through the mass planting of spekboom and paying for the work through the carbon markets. 

The World Bank created a pot of $120 million specifically for this. According to Amazon, the tech giant’s commitment to buy some of the carbon credits from the first project to benefit from the bond gave financiers enough confidence in the business model to come on board with additional funding. 

The first project to draw on this purse expects its restoration work to bring around $500 million into a stagnant farming community over the next 40 years. This will come from just over half its operations, with more planned, and will flow in through wages, rental income, carbon credit revenue sharing with farmers, taxes, and small business development initiatives.

This investigation has examined the origins of spekboom-led restoration the science behind its potential promise (Part 1), and the possible pitfalls if projects don’t meet those expectations [link-part 2]. In this third and final part, we find an emerging nature-based carbon capture  sector that has become dominated by international corporations whose investment promises are hard to scrutinize. Now, key questions remain around what happens when projects operate in an opaque accountability environment, and the possible fallout if projects fail. 

Going bust 

The trail of breadcrumbs between this former farm camp and what’s become known as the Lake Kariba scandal is sparse in the news coverage. But it’s there. 

Concerns about the possibility of fraud in the nature-based carbon offsets sector had been surfacing for some time. But one particular case sent shockwaves through the industry in Southern Africa in 2023. The New Yorker magazine’s Heidi Blake broke the story of a forest conservation project in Zimbabwe, billed as one of the largest of its kind and spanning more than 700,000 hectares (1.7 million acres), that had grossly inflated the amount of atmospheric carbon pollution it claimed to have avoided through keeping trees standing in the Zambezi River Valley. 

More than half of the project’s 27 million carbon credits were found to be fabricated. The project was owned by Guernsey-based company Carbon Green Investments (CGI), with Swiss carbon credit broker South Pole handling the development, according to Bloomberg.

The repercussions were felt as far south as here, close to where Hamp-Adams is doing his veld inspection. South Pole, which had been running a small spekboom restoration operation nearby, quietly shut it down following the Lake Kariba incident. In the wake of the closure, Hamp-Adams’ team rescued some of the orphaned spekboom. 

The closure left an unknown number of people without jobs, and an unknown number of hectares abandoned in a state of disrepair. Were these lands browsed, heavily browsed, or knackered? It’s hard to know. South Pole, one of the most powerful global brokers in the industry, is tight-lipped.     

When we asked for details on the project’s closure — how far along it was, how many jobs were lost or didn’t materialize, what the carbon-capture goals were — the company said merely that this was an early-stage pilot.

“As with many pilot initiatives, we periodically assess their commercial viability,” South Pole responded by email through a media consultant. “In this case we decided to close the project. We’re not able to offer further information at this time.”

Clear as mud 

Spekboom has long been trumpeted as the crown prince of South Africa’s nature-based carbon cleanup solutions. The World Bank ensured its coronation recently with its newly minted $120 million outcome-based bond, structured and named in its honor. The listing of this novel financial instrument was made possible through Amazon’s backing, according to the tech giant, with the corporation agreeing to buy some of the carbon credits from the first developer to draw on the funds.

Does this make Amazon the power behind the throne in an emerging nature-based carbon credit sector?

Not in terms of the running of the restoration projects themselves, but in what sustainability scientist Henrik Österblom and colleagues at the Stockholm Resilience Centre at Sweden’s Stockholm University say is the emergence of a keystone actor from the corporate world that has an outsized influence on the system in which projects like this operate. The idea riffs off the concept of keystone species in nature, like termites in an African savanna, which are regarded as ecosystem engineers, so significant is their role in shaping the environment around them. 

Here the concept applies to Amazon having disproportionate influence to shape a niche emerging nature-based carbon sink sector in a tiny corner of Africa where farmers need ecosystem repair as urgently as a burn victim needs lifesaving skin grafts. 

Did Amazon’s door-to-door consumer goods delivery model find another commodity to trade with?

Amazon isn’t investing directly in this farming community, as has been misreported in places. It also isn’t buying these spekboom-generated carbon credits to offset its own emissions, either. The corporation is frank that its approach is to buy credits in order to sell these on to partners in its supply chain who need to offset their own emissions. Amazon has created a one-stop digital shop to handle the transactions: Its newly launched carbon credit exchange, the Sustainability Exchange, where its partners can buy “trusted” and “high-quality” carbon credits.

The corporation was vague on the details of how it will trade the credits on its exchange and would not reveal if it will pay market prices or benefit from a bulk-buy discount. Its media office said only that the price for these credits reflects their higher market value as a result of being of better quality. 

Amazon said it doesn’t disclose the commercial terms of its agreements; however, the media office confirmed that the corporation will build a charge for administering the service into the selling price. This includes a “small margin to cover headcount, tech, registry fees, and other costs.” Amazon would not share details on the precise structure and pricing of these add-ons.  

Intermediary traders and carbon market exchanges usually charge between 5% and 30% for administrative fees, according to Carbon Market Watch. 

In its 2023 report, the nonprofit watchdog warned that without a line of sight on the costing structure of these fees, the public can’t adequately scrutinize the numbers. This lack of transparency makes it difficult to verify if fees are reasonable or if profit markups have been built in. Carbon Market Watch calls for greater transparency around pricing, markups and admin fees, and urges buyers to boycott intermediaries who don’t make this information public. 

Big promises, closed books: The opaque new currency of carbon credits

The first spekboom restoration project to benefit from the World Bank bond is Singapore-based infrastructure developer Imperative Global Solutions Pte. Ltd., a company founded in 2022 that focuses on nature-based ecosystem restoration, funded through carbon markets.

Spekboom restoration projects until now have been artisanal in scale, most of them under 5,500 hectares (about 14,000 acres).

Imperative’s arrival in 2024 changed that. Work kicked off in November that year with a 10,000-hectare (nearly 25,000-acre) pilot planting phase, which it completed in just over a year. The company then secured $91 million in loans, which accelerated its planting ambitions. The World Bank bond provided $25 million, and another $66 million came from a handful of other investors. The flush in money allows it to increase its first-phase operation five times, with another big expansion planned thereafter. Imperative plans to have a total of 100,000 hectares (about 247,000 acres) under spekboom by around 2030. 

As these tough succulents grow, the company expects them to draw down 41.6 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent (tCO2e) over the next 40 years. This will allow Imperative to earn the equivalent number of carbon credits, as one metric ton of CO2 removed from the atmosphere converts to one carbon credit. Amazon has agreed to buy some of the first crop to come from one half of the project: 1.95 million credits in all, which amounts to 9.4% of the 20.8 million carbon credits that this new 50,000-hectare (124,000-acre) planting is expected to produce over four decades. 

Imperative anticipates $500 million reaching the community from the first 60,000 hectares (nearly 150,000 acres) over 40 years. How much of this materializes depends on how much atmospheric carbon the spekboom plantings draw from the atmosphere as they grow, the price of carbon credits over time, and the revenue sharing agreed between Imperative and the farmers it has partnered with. Imperative wouldn’t disclose the terms of the contracts with farmers, though, which stipulate the details of the revenue share. (Imperative’s business model differs from others in that it opts to rent land from farmers rather than buying. This allows the restoration work to reach more land and landowners to keep their properties.)

The method to calculate the carbon drawdown potential of a recovering thicket has been developing for over two decades. But it’s still a relatively young field, and it can only advance as fast as the early spekboom plantings grow. A project’s business model may forecast 10 tCO2e of drawdown per hectare per year. But project staff may only know in 10-15 years what the actual accumulation of carbon is in the soils and plants. If it’s only 5 or 7 tCO2e, the project will only earn the equivalent number of carbon credits.

“We only get paid for what we deliver,” says Scobie Mackay, Imperative’s CEO. 

The market price of this novel currency is another factor. 

Carbon credits from the first plantings should start to trickle in as soon as 2027 or 2028, according to Imperative. How much each credit is worth depends on its type and price fluctuations on the market. Nature-based carbon drawdown credits that come from forestry plantations involving monocrop tree planting are on the lower end of the range for the reforestation and revegetation category. These were selling for around $14 in 2025, according to the World Bank. Projects that provide biodiversity habitat repair alongside their climate benefits, like these spekboom projects, have higher values. Imperative’s Mackay references the data provider and analytics firm MSCI Carbon Markets on this, although he wouldn’t disclose the price category that applies to Imperative’s credits. MSCI told us that the most likely price point for these spekboom-generated credits is around $45. 

Meanwhile, an industry insider who asked not to be named said that most local projects are working on a value of $20 to $25 a credit.

How much will Amazon pay for its 1.95 million carbon credits? How much of that will flow into the farming community in Albany thicket country, and over what period of time? 

Neither Amazon nor Imperative would reveal the price they’ve settled on. But these credits, they say, will be high-value, bought at a fixed price and purchased during the first earning period, which Amazon gives as an open-ended “more than a decade.” 

Based on this, and the range of prices for this category of credit, I estimate that Amazon’s bill for the 1.95 million carbon credits could be anything from $39 million at the lower range of $20 per credit, to $87.75 million if trading at $45 a credit. 

The carbon credit returns reaching the community will ultimately depend on how much organic carbon shows up in the plant and soil samples measured over coming years, which depends on how well the next four or five years of plantings take root, as reported previously, and on the company’s profit-sharing agreements.

Keep it real 

Sonia Latola smiles coyly when the attention turns to her on a warm winter’s afternoon as she knock-knock-knocks a 3-month-old spekboom cutting free from its rooting container beneath the domed shade cloth at the Hive Ecosystems nursery, less than an hour’s drive from some of Imperative’s farms. She and her colleague Elistine Fisant live in the area and are, for the time being, enjoying the flush of jobs that these planting projects bring. Every day, these two transfer thousands of cuttings into crates that get hauled up a precarious country road by tractor. There, a crew with pickaxes and hand trowels will place the young plants gently but speedily into the ground, cutting by cutting, laboriously and by hand. 

Like Return to Thicket, Hive Ecosystems is a small but established spekboom restoration project in a sector that is now seeing a growth spurt as the World Bank and other financiers recognize the business model for funding ecosystem restoration in these exhausted farmlands. 

Many of the people interviewed — farm laborers, businesspeople, landowners, and many others — say they don’t understand how this strange new currency of carbon credits works. They can’t fully grasp how invisible carbon dioxide translates into the tangible dollars and cents that are promised in recent press releases. They do hold onto the hope, though, that these new investments will bail out desperate farmers and put real cash in the pockets of people in a part of the world where jobs are scarce and the farming economy of yesteryear is on its knees. 

For more than two centuries, South Africa’s big developers have mostly been in extractive sectors such as mining and related industries. The developers of tomorrow are viewing ecosystem repair as a new frontier, recognizing the business opportunities that will allow for the rehabilitation of the very natural infrastructure left damaged by extractive industries. That some prominent Global North financiers are seeing the business potential of investing in ecosystem repair in an area as tiny and niche as South Africa’s Albany thicket biome suggests that farming with a novel agricultural crop in the Global South — carbon — may indeed be the new gold rush, for better or for worse. 

This is the third article in a three-part investigation of spekboom-led ecosystem restoration in South Africa. This is part of 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 and two.

The number of cuttings this Hive Ecosystem team manages to plant in a day is dizzying. This project is halfway toward its original goal of planting spekboom across nearly 5,500 hectares (nearly 13,000 acres). Picture: Leonie Joubert

• A unique approach to ecosystem restoration in South Africa — repairing exhausted farmlands through the mass planting of spekboom — is receiving global attention as one new entrant gets an injection of $91 million to dramatically increase its plantings. 
• This will contribute toward the goal of planting more than 300 million spekboom (Portulacaria afra) cuttings, funded by investors through global carbon markets. 
• Smaller restoration projects have blazed a trail until now, helping to improve planting and land management methods to get maximum plant survival, bush recovery and, ultimately, carbon credit returns.
• Plant survival rates through the next five planting seasons will dictate how well farmlands recover in coming decades, whether they deliver on the carbon drawdown expectations, and whether investors get their returns. But our investigation finds that things may be getting off to a rocky start.

The team of diggers crisscrossing a hard-to-reach hill on a remote farm in South Africa’s Eastern Cape province shows how tough spekboom planting is. A row of men, each arcing a pickax over his head to his own rhythm, punctures a Morse code of holes into the earth. Behind him, a planter drops a rooted spekboom cutting into the hole, fills it, and tamps the soil gently with a trowel. Between them, a runner, his bag not unlike that of an old-school postman, ferries cuttings from the tractor that has labored up a treacherous country track from the nursery on a nearby farm. 

They’ll get a few thousand plants into the ground today, give or take, but the team works so fast that the numbers blur after a while. 

It’s grueling. But the men are upbeat. It’s work, many say, in a region where unemployment is high and the stagnant farming sector unlikely to change anytime soon.

The planters are doing the first steps in helping repair the land on a farm owned by Hive Ecosystems, one of the more established outfits in a small but emerging restoration sector. Here, ecologists hope that mass planting with spekboom (Portulacaria afra) will be the first step in the recovery of what’s known as the Albany thicket ecosystem. Generations of heavy livestock rearing — mostly with mohair-producing goats — have reduced once-impenetrable hedge-like bush to something akin to desert across 1.5 million hectares (3.7 million acres) of farmland. Nothing much will grow here anymore. Except spekboom. 

These projects are drawing on carbon markets to raise the capital needed to fund the wide-scale planting of this drought-hardy, easy-to-grow plant. Investors provide the funds now, with the promise of earnings from a new kind of agricultural crop down the line: atmospheric carbon banked away in the plants and soils, which translates into the currency of carbon credits. 

The business case for this has been in development for roughly two decades. It is now so convincing that the World Bank recently listed an outcome-based bond tailored specifically to fund the work, with a pot of $120 million that’s available to developers in the spekboom sector. The first to draw on this loan is a new entrant: Singapore-based infrastructure developer Imperative Global Solutions Pte. Ltd., which specializes in ecosystem restoration at scale, and whose operations are taking what was artisanal and making it industrial in size and approach.

Spekboom planting is now increasing at a pace and scale unlike anything tried before. What happens in the field over the next four or five years will determine how well the vegetation and, hopefully, the broader ecosystem recover over the coming decades. Planting success will dictate whether it delivers on the carbon capture expectations promised by developers, how this translates into carbon credits and, ultimately, whether investors get their returns.

This little corner of the country needs the restoration work the way a burn victim needs lifesaving skin grafts [TK Link to story 1]. Many of these farmlands are so exhausted that there may only be one agricultural crop left to grow here: carbon. If projects don’t make good on their promises, insiders worry that it will undermine investor confidence, scare off financiers, and be the death knell for a farming sector that’s already on life support.

Getting it right: How to plant a succulent, at scale

The Hive Ecosystems project is roughly halfway toward its goal of getting spekboom sprigs into 5,431 hectares (13,420  acres) on its properties near Jansenville, about an hour’s drive inland of the port city of Gqeberha. Managing director Japie Buckle would like to double that planting area if they can buy more land.

The thicketeers — that’s what some ecologists, researchers and project implementers call themselves — agree that planting spekboom isn’t rocket science. But doing so fast and at scale needs to be done carefully, and they’re sharing what they learn as they go.

Their field notes might sound like succulent wonks geeking out on gardening hacks. But their watchful attention to planting and post-planting teething issues — what works and what doesn’t, even months or years down the line — will be key to ensuring the survival of well over 300 million spekboom plants that will be put in the ground across all projects, cutting by cutting, laboriously and by hand, over the next four or so winter planting seasons. 

“Spekboom is hardy. It’s evolved here,” says Nick Hamp-Adams, general manager of Return to Thicket, one of the smaller restoration projects that incorporates two exhausted former mohair goat farms. No need to coddle it in the nursery or too much after planting, he says, but be gentle when putting it in the ground and do immediate post-planting follow-up.

“How you plant matters,” Hamp-Adams adds, smiling. “Make sure your teams are handling them like babies.”

The process that most projects follow is simple: Harvest cuttings from wild-growing spekboom; give them roughly three or four months in the nursery to establish roots; and then plant them in a degraded spot. Most of the projects are deliberately low-tech and bare bones. They might work on an estimated cost-per-unit of 9-21 U.S. cents to get a cutting through the process.

Rooted cuttings take time and cost more to get veld-ready, but they establish better than unrooted ones, which don’t need much nursery time, according to Buckle, a seasoned restoration ecologist with decades of wetland rehabilitation under his belt. There’s a sweet spot where a cutting’s stem thickness and root size improve its odds, without spending too much time in the nursery.

Little tweaks at planting can improve a cutting’s chances, like propping a small rock at an angle to its base. This captures condensation, moistens the roots, and creates a gentle microclimate, says Jacquie Pastor, a consultant to a restoration project KBH Carbon, set up by its parent company, the mining conglomerate KBH Group, which has planted the first 1,000 hectares (about 2,500 acres) with the goal of eventually restoring 5,000 hectares (roughly 12,000 acres) of land. 

The tradeoff: Slower planting speed, better survival.

Learning from the teething problems 

“You need to calculate in some die-off,” Hamp-Adams says, scanning a section of one Return to Thicket farm where the sparse ground cover has sprigs of spekboom dotted about in every direction. It’s early winter, and the cuttings have had four months to settle in.

There will always be some cuttings that don’t make it. Many of the smaller projects report relatively low mortality — between one and three cuttings dying for every 10 planted. But that figure can vary, depending on how the cuttings are planted and how the land is managed in the weeks and months that follow.

One pilot site at Kwandwe Private Game Reserve near the town of Makhanda — part of an ecotourism-focused collection of farms owned by C-SA Properties, whose restoration work is being done by  CSA Carbon — had “super high mortality rates” along one edge of the plot, according to Kwandwe’s environment manager, Craig Sholto-Douglas. Six or seven out of 10 cuttings died. But toward the center of the plot, jackpot: Eight out of 10 made it. 

Speaking at a thicket restoration forum in 2024, Sholto-Douglas put this down to the dance between predator and prey: Antelopes were lingering in a part of the site where they felt safe, so they browsed heavily here. But they moved quickly through the open area where they felt in danger, only nibbling the plants along the way. 

Sholto-Douglas has been overseeing spekboom planting across 2,000 hectares (roughly 5,000 acres) of reclaimed farmlands around the edge of the reserve. This initiative is one that’s geared toward improving natural bush for wildlife and ecotourism, much like a similar project run at Kuzuko Private Game Reserve not far from here.

In spite of having a breather from heavy livestock pressure, parts of these farms still haven’t recovered on their own after 25 years, according to Sholto-Douglas. The spekboom plants should change that.

These real-life experiences are all critical data points for landowners who might one day want to reintroduce wildlife or livestock onto recovering lands. All have different histories, Sholto-Douglas says, all are in different states of disrepair. With only four years to learn from these teething problems, time is ticking for this emerging sector.

Going big

Most projects are artisanal in size, and planting is proceeding slowly. It’s taken Hive Ecosystems three years to achieve the first half of its planting goal with a crew of nearly 50 people in the nursery and out in the veld. Return to Thicket got its first 1,000 hectares planted in 14 months, with 10 people handling the nursery side and 10 planting.

The new entrant to the sector, Imperative, which has attracted World Bank funding and Amazon’s attention, has bigger ambitions. It aims to complete its goal of planting 100,000 hectares (about 247,000 acres) within the next four to five years. According to Tiaan Burger, Imperative’s spekboom restoration project manager, the operation will be able to plant 20,000 hectares (nearly 50,000 acres) per year once it’s running at full speed.

The company has also opted for a more technical approach to propagating its cuttings, using a trademarked specialist rooting method from Danish company Ellepot, which is said to shorten nursery time and protect against planting shock, according to the manufacturer.

Burger wouldn’t comment on Imperative’s cost per unit to get a cutting from harvesting to planting. And Ellepot’s South Africa office also wouldn’t disclose the cost per unit for the product that Imperative uses. However, based on industry information from others familiar with such calculations, Mongabay estimates that Imperative’s cost per unit is perhaps 50 U.S. cents per rooted cutting, roughly double what smaller operators budget for.

While the smaller projects’ plantings are ticking over slowly, Imperative arrived in the area in 2024 and had its first 10,000 hectares (25,000 acres) planted in just over a year. According to Burger, planting began in November 2025 on the second phase — the 50,000 hectares (nearly 124,000 acres) that have attracted a $91 million loan funded in part by the World Bank and derisked with Amazon’s buy-in. The goal, he says, is to complete all this planting — five times the size of phase one — within two years. With further planned expansion, Imperative calculates a total carbon drawdown of 41.6 million metric tons of carbon dioxide across its 100,000 hectares over 40 years, averaging out to 10.4 metric tons of carbon dioxide per hectare per year. 

Projects are unlikely to see much carbon build-up in the total carbon stock — the plant matter and soils — in the first five or so years, because the young trees will need to establish. It will take roughly 10-15 years before they’re developed and shedding enough leaf litter and root matter to reflect significantly in soil and plant biomass samples. Carbon uptake will plateau once the canopy has grown closed, and spekboom will still be the predominant plant. 

Whether the recovering lands show they’ve captured as much carbon as hoped for will depend on how well and how quickly the young cuttings establish.

How fast is too fast?

Questions have emerged about how successful Imperative’s first-phase plantings have been, though, whether it’s scaling up too fast and whether it’ll be able to meet its ultimate targets.

Mongabay has credible information from sources indicating that some of Imperative’s early plantings have experienced die-offs of as much as 80-90%. Burger wouldn’t comment on whether these figures are accurate. He did say, however, that investors had done their due diligence, including visits to first-phase plantings. Mongabay wasn’t able to establish which sites were visited, by whom or when. But Burger maintained that Imperative’s financiers wouldn’t have agreed to the loans if they didn’t have confidence in the company’s ability to deliver. 

Imperative CEO Scobie Mackay also wouldn’t comment on mortality rates and said the developer was learning from its early planting experiences. Many parties working with Imperative, including its implementing partner, NatCarbon Africa, are tied into nondisclosure agreements — standard practice for commercial ventures of this scale, according to Mackay — which makes it difficult to independently verify information provided by Imperative representatives or its partners.

An environmental scientist with extensive experience in restoration work of this type in South Africa, but who asked not to be named because of their proximity to the sector, told Mongabay that such high mortality rates are possible — and not just for spekboom — if plants don’t get the right follow-up care and appropriate land management.

“Our experience on other projects in the region where such care is absent has shown that an 80% to 90% plant mortality rate is not uncommon,” they said. “One cannot just stick a sapling in the ground and hope it will survive.”

There are many things that can kill a sprig: a heat wave; a frosty snap; or unusually wet soils causing rot. Hungry animals, too. 

The Kwandwe reserve team found a few unusual candidates taking advantage of some of their young spekboom.

One batch of plants had been in the ground for 18 months and, by all accounts, looked like they were surviving. But they weren’t thriving.

“All of them still upright. All of them rooted beautifully,” Sholto-Douglas says.

It turns out that, while the reserve’s management team had been able to keep the large browsing animals out of these recovering lands, they hadn’t accounted for the little ones, like Cape scrub hares (Lepus saxatilis) and gray duikers (Sylvicapra grimmia), a regular antelope to these parts.

Locals here say that spekboom is to goats what ice cream is to a toddler. But it seems that small wildlife feel the same way about these irresistible plants, another important data point for the sector as spekboom planting goes industrial scale.

This is the second article in a three-part investigation of spekboom-led ecosystem restoration in South Africa. It is part of 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 and three.

If Sizeni Dlamini makes R300 from a day’s trade in second hand clothing and shoes, she’ll dip into it to buy basic groceries A bit more, and she’ll add a few more things to the food basket on her way home. More still, and she’ll replenish her business’s stock. Picture: Leonie Joubert

No work, no pay. 

No one knows this better than Sizeni Dlamini. She’s been selling second-hand clothes and shoes from her patch at Warwick Junction, beneath an overpass in Durban’s inner city, for 16 years. If it rains, passers-by dash through the usually bustling market. Who’s going to stop to browse soggy clothing, and likely get soaked through? 

Same in the heat. 

“People just pass by,” the 55-year-old says. “They don’t have time to stand in the sun and choose clothes. It would be much better if we had shelter.”

Call her what you will — micro-business operator, entrepreneur, street trader — but Dlamini’s isn’t the kind where she can close the shop door when it’s a scorcher, even if trade is down.

The recent summer was pretty grim, even for someone like her, whose body is acclimatised to the notoriously muggy East Coast weather where the warm Indian Ocean puts plenty of water vapour into the air, pushing up the discomfort levels and health risks on hotter days.

“It was really bad,” she recalls.

Durban didn’t experience any formal heatwave conditions this summer, according to climatologists — for that, the city would need to register temperatures of 34°C or higher for three days or more — but people were nevertheless exposed to dangerously hot weather at times. The most sweltering day came in early autumn: the Ballito weather station, about 50km north of the inner city, registered a maximum of 33°C on 20 March. With the humidity reaching 62%, the felt temperature  would have been 45°C, well into the range for developing symptoms of heat exhaustion for those not able to find ways to shelter from the heat.

But densely built-up inner city areas like Warwick Junction are heavily tarred, paved and concreted over. Surfaces like this trap heat, making conditions in these heat islands 5°C to 10°C hotter than a city’s leafier outskirts. 

Women feel the heat more acutely than men, and are more likely to be hurt by income loss because of it. It’s partly their body’s make-up — women don’t shed heat through sweating as efficiently as men do, so will experience health impacts at a lower threshold than men — but also because many work in lower-paying and informal heat-exposed jobs, such as farming, street trading, garment making, or care work, according to the US-based non-profit HERA. The organisation recognises the greater risk that lower-income and self-employed women face because of extreme heat, both to their health, and their income, and works in various Global South countries to help them become more heat-resilient.

The first line of defence for traders who are exposed to the elements in this way, local occupational health expert from the University of KwaZulu Natal professor Rajen Naidoo says, is to put in heat-buffering solutions — think in terms of shelter, water, and rest — with the city responsible for most of the necessary infrastructure. 

Once that’s in place, though, a novel form of income protection insurance might be something that could encourage women to shut up shop during the worst of a heat event, without fear of her family going hungry.

Bathroom breaks 

“This is the piss wall,” says Patrick Ndlovu, cheeks dimpling with humour as he points out the face-brick wall with its makeshift urinal along a stretch of pavement not far from the stall holders. 

Hand-sprayed lettering barks a command to passers-by in isiZulu. The sentence is poetic and gritty: two layers of paint, florid green over black; some ee cummings flare to the grammar, which doesn’t bother with capital letters. 

There’s no polite way to tell the urinal’s users that this is no place for solids. 

“If you defecate here,” Ndlovu translates delicately, “if caught, you will be compelled to take it away.”

The wall is topped with coils of barbed wire and some medieval-looking spikes overlooking a riot of off-duty minibus taxis getting soaped down on the pavement. 

At first glance, these facilities look pretty grim. The air is thick with the smell of urine being alchemised into vapour in the mid-morning heat. The two 25-litre water containers — each with a shoulder cut away to create a pee bucket — are working overtime. One’s overflowing, the other’s getting there. But it’s much better than it used to be, according to Ndlovu, who is the co-founder of the urban renewal non-profit Asiye eTafuleni. The organisation has been working here for nearly two decades, supporting informal traders to know their rights and legitimise their place in the city’s economy. 

At a most practical level, that means sorting out the lavatory situation. 

Warwick Junction’s broken-down municipal toilet block has been barred and bolted for six years, with the city giving no indication of why it hasn’t been repaired, or if it will be. For the many thousands of people who pass through this rabbit warren daily, or ply their trade in and around the market, this means that when their bladders call, they have little option but to go al fresco. 

This is easier said than done if you’re a woman, which matters during summer. Many women traders say they hold back on drinking water during the day because they don’t want to have to deal with the inevitable consequences. 

This will lead to dehydration. When the body’s heat-stressed, it puts extra strain on the kidneys, leaving the body’s clean-up system overloaded with salts and toxins but with too little water to do the job. The upshot: higher risk of urinary tract infection, but also longer-term kidney damage. 

In principle, a key solution to a heat-resilient trading community here is simple: get clean drinking water coming in, and black water flushing out. In a sentence: restore the municipal ablution block. 

The eThekwini municipality did not respond to a request for clarity on why the public amenities at Warwick Junction aren’t working, why they haven’t been repaired, or if there are plans to do so.

Until such a time, Ndlovu and his team have been experimenting with low-cost outdoor urinals, knocked together from materials you can pick up at a local hardware store — PVC piping, wooden planks, buckets, shade cloth. Men, at least, have a discrete nook to relieve themselves. They’re asked to pay R2 for the convenience, but no sweat if they can’t, says Ndlovu. 

But what about the women? 

There’s a nondescript plywood walk-in booth near Dlamini’s clothing stall. It’s the size of an average wardrobe, and the only thing telling a passer-by that it’s the women’s facility is the universal sign on the door: a stick-figure illustration of a person in a dress. 

There’s no comfortable sit-down loo with flushing water inside, or even a dry-toilet system. But it’s a private, dignified place for a woman to relieve herself over a small bucket, the contents of which she’ll toss down the nearest storm water drain. 

The next step is to recruit what the Asiye eTafuleni team calls urine entrepreneurs — most likely people living rough in the neighbourhood who are keen to make a bit of cash — to empty the urinal buckets into nearby stormwater drains for a small fee. 

It’s one small part of the shade-water-rest triage that’s necessary to make these traders more heat-resilient in an ever hotter world. 

“Back in five minutes” 

Besides drinking plenty of water during hot weather, traders like Dlamini should do one more thing that they’re not likely to: take a break.  

Because: no work, no pay.

But what if they have income protection insurance that paid out if conditions get hot enough — dangerous enough— that they need to close their stalls for a few hours? Allowing them to stay safe without foregoing the food they need to put on the table that night.  

HERA is piloting something like this in India, Sierra Leone, Pakistan, Thailand and the USA, using philanthropic money, buy-in from local insurance companies, and small premiums paid by traders. Founder and CEO Kathy Baughman McLeod reckons it could work for Warwick Junction traders, too.

“Women in a market in Freetown, Sierra Leone, lose 60% of their income to heat,” says Baughman McLeod. “Whether that’s their own illness, if foot traffic is down, or (when their stock) has gone bad.” 

For the price of roughly one day’s takings — in Sierra Leone, that’s around R130; for Dlamini, it might be R200 — the woman will get paid out the equivalent of a day’s earnings for every day that conditions are hot enough to be recognised as dangerous. It’s an index-based insurance, meaning they’re guaranteed to get a paid out purely on the basis of a heat event occurring. No site-visits or assessments to verify the impact of the heat event. 

The threshold temperature that triggers a heat-event payout is site-specific.  

For traders like those in Durban, this could be calculated based on the city’s own weather station data — it has several — and satellite imagery. Given the Warwick traders operate in an urban heat island, the trigger temperature would need to be calculated to accommodate that, too. Ideally an on-site weather station would give the most accurate measurements of temperature and humidity in the market complex. Some of the HERA pilot initiatives are also drawing on biometric data from traders themselves, using digital fitness trackers which allow a correlation between weather data and the physical markers of women’s heat stress. 

The current insurance structure is event-based. Once a triangulation of different weather data registers that the trigger temperature has been reached, the insurance company partners will guarantee the payout, usually within 10 days or less.  

“But we want to go to forecast-based payouts,” says Baughman McLeod. “If we know it’s going to be hot and humid, and the trigger (conditions) are predicted for, say, five days from now, then half or all of the payout (will be made) in advance. The trigger is the forecast, not the actual event.”

A forecast-based approach would also give women early warning of an approaching extreme event so they can plan stock purchases, make alternate childcare arrangements, and change their operating hours.

Making a plan 

The income insurance isn’t a silver bullet, says Baughman McLeod. The heat resilience triage needs to start with heat-buffering solutions — think in terms of shelter, water, and rest — with the city responsible for most of the necessary infrastructure and various social protections.

The eThekwini municipality says it recognises heat stress as a pressing issue. It has various climate-focused plans, strategies and working groups in place, and has a range of partnerships such as with the World Resources Institute and the C40 Cool Cities network which aim to coordinate climate responses. Although it’s unclear what the timelines are for these solutions materialising in this part of the inner city. 

Until such a time as the city brings the shelter, water, and resting options, the old South African maxim — ’n boer maak ’n plan — is alive and well amongst these stallholders. Thandazile Nyathi sells beef and chicken braaied over open coals at her stand not far from Dlamini’s clothing stall. BBQ sauce, shisanyama spice, plain salt, curry. Loads of sides — rice, phuthu (a stiff porridge from maize meal), beans, spinach, samp, cabbage.  

She trades from a makeshift shelter on a pavement where taxis roar past nearby. Her work-around for not having a fridge?

“You buy your food in the morning, and sell it all in one day,” she says. 

Nomusa Luthuli has some beach brollies that she puts up over her fruit stand when the sun gets hot and high. Soft fruits, like today’s plums, go pap quickly in the heat. Her solution: a repurposed 500ml cool drink bottle, with a few holes punctured on one side, makes a sprinkler system. A few squirts every now and then to cool things down, and her stock will likely have of a longer life. 

This article is from Story Ark – tales from southern Africa’s climate tipping points, an award-winning collaboration with the Stellenbosch University School for Climate Studies, Henry Nxumalo Foundation, and the Pulitzer Center.