Energy & Sustainability

Google signs major Indonesian carbon removal credits deal

Google has signed a deal with agroforestry carbon removal firm Thryve.Earth to purchase 260,000 tons of carbon removal credits from a reforestation project in Sulawesi, Indonesia.

Google purchases carbon removal credits to offset its greenhouse gas emissions, presumably including those from its data centres.

Thryve.Earth is a nature-based landscape restoration company developing high-integrity projects across South and Southeast Asia, using carbon markets as a vehicle to finance the underlying work. 

The purchase was made through the Symbiosis Coalition, a carbon-buying consortium formed in 2024 alongside Meta, Microsoft and Salesforce, which focuses on purchasing nature-based removal credits.

Symbiosis members Google and McKinsey have committed to forward offtakes of over 335,000 tonnes of carbon removal from Thryve over ten years. Chinese technology company Tencent has also committed to forward offtakes – in this case of 300,000 tonnes of carbon removal over ten years, representing the company’s first offtake agreement outside of China.

This project restores degraded land in Sulawesi through fruit and timber trees that store carbon while generating lasting income for local communities. 

Sulawesi is one of the most biodiverse and carbon-rich regions on Earth. Its tropical rainforests have been significantly degraded due to a combination of shifting agriculture, soil erosion, and invasive species. Thousands of hectares once blanketed in biodiverse forests are now unruly patchworks of invasive and fire-prone grasses, with smallholder farmers struggling to support their livelihoods with increasingly depleted soils.

The Sulawesi project aims to restore these landscapes overrun by invasive grasses with a mixed crop farming system that sequesters carbon, replenishes soils, reduces fire risk, and increases biodiversity and income for local farmers. 

Thryve.earth says carbon finance is critical to enabling this project to scale. Carbon offtake commitments provide necessary volume and price certainty, enabling Thryve to raise the financing that will allow this project to scale to thousands of hectares of land.

Thryve.earth adds that the environmental benefits extend well beyond carbon. Previous projects using a similar model have led to expanded tree cover, improved soil health and greater resilience to drought and fire within the first few years. In addition to farming income, the project also creates regular job opportunities for local community members to get the land ready.

As the Data Centre Dynamics news service points out, the agreement is Google’s latest in the carbon removal space. In March, the company signed a deal with Commonwealth Sortation to purchase 200,000 biochar-related removal credits by 2030. Commonwealth Sortation is an affiliate of AMP Robotics Corporation, which applies AI-powered sortation at scale to modernise the world's recycling infrastructure and maximise the value in waste.



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