In an exclusive interview with News24, Kara Hurst, Amazon’s Chief Sustainability Officer, responded to concerns about water and energy use as the e-commerce and web services giant expands its footprint in South Africa.
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Amazon will purchase 1.95 million carbon credits over more than a decade from an Eastern Cape spekboom restoration project, but the e-commerce giant will not use them to offset its own emissions.
Instead, the company will sell the credits on its carbon marketplace to other firms, including Climate Pledge signatories, Amazon Web Services (AWS) customers and supply chain partners.
The announcement came on Tuesday as Amazon, in collaboration with the World Bank and other financial institutions, launched the second phase of a project to restore 50 000 hectares of degraded land in the Eastern Cape – an area more than twice the size of Table Mountain National Park.
Since April 2021, more than 30 million spekboom plants have been planted across 10 000 hectares in the Jansenville area, approximately 150 km northwest of Gqeberha. The drought-hardy succulent is renowned for its ability to capture and store carbon and restore degraded landscapes.
Phase 2 will see an additional 50 000 hectares restored through new plantings, with plans to expand to more than 100 000 hectares.
A carbon credit is a tradable certificate representing one tonne of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO₂e) that is avoided or removed from the atmosphere. Companies can purchase these credits to offset their emissions, either voluntarily or to meet regulatory requirements.
News24 interviewed Kara Hurst, Amazon’s chief sustainability officer, who leads the global teams working on environmental sustainability and social responsibility across the company. She is responsible for getting Amazon to net-zero carbon emissions by 2040.
- Why this project and why South Africa, not rainforest restoration or something similar elsewhere?
Well, with Amazon, we invest through our Right Now Climate Fund and a lot of our biodiversity work all around the world, but South Africa is special to us. We have been here for many, many years, and we are continuing to expand our business. All of the places where we live, work, and operate are incredibly important to us. We’re expanding in South Africa and we believe in this place, in the economy, in the people.
What we’ve seen here so far, we want to be a part of this community. What we know about spekboom and this project, the opportunity that came to us was a hugely unique opportunity that we were able to be a part of by being the corporate buyer behind these credits. The work that we were able to put together in collaboration with the World Bank, with our partners here on the ground, and the community in particular, the economic development aspects of this project could be so impactful to this area.
So for us, when we see those opportunities to have multiple wins for the planet and for nature and for the community, that’s something we want to be a part of. The role that we can play is beneficial to us as a corporation, to the planet, and to the community – that’s a huge win.
- How do you respond to concerns that the voluntary carbon market constitutes “greenwashing” and that Amazon’s participation in this project is an attempt to distract from the potential negative environmental implications of the expansion of its data centre footprint in South Africa?
I’m really glad you asked about this because this is exactly why we got involved in this issue. There absolutely has been scepticism about what’s out there in carbon markets, and so what we’re able to bring to this is an incredibly high bar of science, and so everything that we’ve been doing in carbon markets is intended to address this exact question.
If you look deeply into the science that we’re bringing behind this, you’ll find years of research from our science team that’s fully transparent.
One, we use the Abacus standard, and that means we bring a highly transparent standard to every single credit that we’re purchasing. We also go out and get a financial rating. Those kinds of globally respected standards, whether they’re in the financial markets or in the carbon credit markets, are very, very important.
I can understand why people want to look at the transparency, look at the credibility of these things. There are some that aren’t credible out there. We don’t accept those.
We hold an incredibly high bar, and only those who meet our standards are going to be available on our credit carbon marketplace, which is why so many of the people who are participating in that carbon marketplace utilise Amazon’s science standard and our due diligence as the filter for what they’re going to participate in.
So we know that Amazon suppliers, AWS [Amazon Web Services] customers, and those who have set the goals that qualify to buy credits from us feel fully confident in participating with us, a climate pledge signatory. So all of those folks utilise our science, our due diligence, the trust that they have in our process, and you can read all about this.
We published all of this transparently. They want to participate with us because we’ve done years and years of scientific research, and we hold those standards very, very high, and I think anybody who’s participating now in carbon markets should do the same.
So either participate with us or do what we’ve done and utilise the same standards because that’s what the carbon credit markets need. We need these financial mechanisms. We need these standards because the world needs more of these kinds of projects, and they need them to be credible.
- How much is each carbon credit worth?
We will be selling them on our carbon credit marketplace, so you’ll be able to see that information.
- What potential risks arise as the hectareage increases, and how will you address them?
I think with a project of this scale, there are always implementation risks, but that’s where we can hopefully bring some of our implementation expertise. We’re really good at operational logistics. We run one of the biggest operational fulfilment logistics businesses in the world, so if they want that kind of input, we are available to give it.
I loved what they talked about this morning, with the number one thing on their minds being safety. So that’s a great indication that they’re running things here in a really credible way with safety at the top of our minds. That’s the number one thing we want; to protect the people who are working here.
There’s always going to be events every single year when we run our business; we’re going to encounter things we hadn’t anticipated. So as long as we’re in communication, we’re talking about whether it’s a weather event, an extreme climate event, whether it’s something that will happen at scale, we’re we’re prepared to deal with this and so we’ll take it as it comes, but I think that we have had the foresight, having had many other types of biodiversity investments at scale, we’re ready for this and as you can see it’s thriving right now.
So this is just about taking what we’re doing in phase one, the sort of 10 000 hectares that have already been implemented, scaling it up to 50 000, and having the ambition to go even further.
- Which specific internal emissions accounting line do these credits contribute to?
So just to be clear, we’re not taking these credits for Amazon’s operations. What we do is we will buy, over time, the 1.96 million credits, but we are going to sell them on our carbon marketplace, and those will be available to other companies. So climate pledge signatories, AWS customers, and supply chain partners who have to make ... a decarbonisation goal of their own across all three scopes that ladder up to 2050.
We also have standards for the buyers, and, by the way, if they don’t know how to do that. We have plenty of tools available on the sustainability exchange, where we will help them to not only make that goal but also operationalise it and implement it. We have a number of free tools on that exchange that over 40 companies have put their playbooks, their tools, all of that on there.
So what we’re trying to do is to open-source as much information as possible around how this can happen for them, but they have to have a credible goal about how to decarbonise their operations first, and then for those emissions that are residual and remaining, they can buy credits, but we’re not taking these credits for ourselves.
- South Africa is a water-scarce country. How do you address water-related consumption concerns as it relates to Amazon’s operations in South Africa?
We are absolutely leading in water. One of the things we’ve done is set a water-positive goal for the Amazon Web Services business. So we’re going to be water-positive by 2030. That means we’re going to return more water to the communities where we live and operate by 2030. We’re already 75% of the way towards that goal, which is a huge achievement. We’re 75% of the way towards being water-positive globally.
We already don’t use water to cool our data centres in South Africa or any place around the world where we’re operating in water-scarce areas. So think about Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Arizona, any of those places. We have other technologies we can use, such as liquid cooling, and we build efficiently.
But where we do operate around the world, and we need to utilise water, we have water replenishment projects that we build efficiently, and we’re 75% of the way towards being water-positive.
In places like India, where we have larger operations, we set a goal to be water-positive by 2027 across all of Amazon’s operations and data centres. But we actually just announced just the other day that we’ve already achieved that goal because we went really, really fast, so we’re already water-positive in India. We also publish water-use efficiency metrics for all our data centres, and we’re leading in this area.
So our water-use efficiency metric is 1.2 litres per kilowatt-hour, and we encourage other data centre providers to publish their water-use efficiency metrics. Our data centres are seven times more water efficient than the industry standard.
- The International Energy Agency found that electricity demand from data centres soared by 17% in 2025. South Africa has one of the most carbon-intensive energy mixes on the planet, and our electricity supply has only recently stabilised. How do you not exacerbate these issues?
We have a number of renewable projects here in South Africa – wind and solar projects. Overall, we have our goal to be net-zero carbon by 2040. We’re one of the world’s largest purchasers of renewable energy in the world. We have over 740 renewable projects across the world.
We are also investing in nuclear, so our clean energy portfolio is huge. Here in South Africa, we’re working with all of the utilities, all of our energy providers, to send the signal that, where possible, we always want to green the grid.
We want to partner with them for resiliency, we want to partner with them on grid modernisation, and we are a customer that will walk in and talk about green energy demand, and signal that this is something very important to us with our long-term goals.
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