UN recognition is latest boost to restoring spekboom across South Africa’s semidesert Karoo
news.mongabay.com
“Spekboom is everywhere, it’s all anyone talks about … what used to be an Angora goat farming town is now a spekboom town,” says field ecologist Rae Attridge. In the past two years, Nat Carbon, the carbon project developer Attridge works for, has planted 10,000 hectares (nearly 25,000 acres) of spekboom in the Klein Karoo, […]

-Since 2004, the South African government has been working to restore spekboom thickets in a semiarid region of the country.

  • This biome, anchored by the hardy, carbon-sequestering spekboom plant, has been massively degraded by two centuries of expanding farming and livestock herding.
  • That long arc of conversion of thicket landscapes to farm and rangeland is now dying, as overgrazing, climate change and shifting markets for agricultural products take their toll.
  • Dozens of private operators have joined the government in trying to restore this biome’s original thicket cover, attracted by the potential for income from carbon credits.