Google to buy carbon credits from major Amazon forest project

Google announced on Thursday that it is purchasing 200,000 metric tons of carbon removal from Brazil’s forest restoration company Mombak. The Amazon forest project is initiated to buy farmland in the Amazon and reforest it.

The Amazon forest project deal was executed via the Symbiosis Coalition, an advanced market commitment supported by Google, McKinsey, Meta, Microsoft, and Salesforce.

This coalition aims to promote the market for nature-based carbon removal projects. The Symbiosis Coalition is comparable to Frontier, another advanced market commitment, also backed by Google and other companies, which focuses on supporting direct air capture initiatives.

Nature-based carbon removal reveals great promise in lowering CO2 levels in the atmosphere, but projects have been difficult to develop and sell for a host of reasons.

Nature-based projects risk falling short of their goals if they are damaged by wildfires or other disasters, and it can be challenging to ensure their long-term viability.

Forests offer significant advantages that direct air capture does not, such as replenishing aquifers and maintaining biodiversity. To help quantify these biodiversity benefits, Google plans to utilize its DeepMind Perch AI on the project.