Google announced Thursday it is buying 200,000 metric tons of carbon removal from Mombak, a forest restoration company based in Brazil. The project will buy farmland in the Amazon and reforest it.
The deal was made through the Symbiosis Coalition, an advance market commitment intended to develop a market for nature-based carbon removal schemes that is backed by Google, McKinsey, Meta, Microsoft, and Salesforce. Symbiosis Coalition is similar to Frontier, an advance market commitment also backed by Google and others that supports direct air capture projects.
Nature-based carbon removal shows great promise in drawing down CO2 levels in the atmosphere, but projects have been challenging to develop and sell for a variety of reasons. Nature-based projects risk falling short of their goals if they’re damaged by wildfires or other disasters, and it can be challenging to guarantee their long-term viability.
Still, they come with many upsides: Forests can replenish aquifers and support biodiversity, neither of which direct air capture can do. Google said it will use its DeepMind PerchAI to help quantify biodiversity benefits of the project.
