ReSpek Nature

ReSpek Nature provides a trusted platform that allows any consumer to offset their carbon emissions in a click. 

ReSpek Nature plants Spekboom, a CO2 capturing endemic succulent, on tracts of denuded land in the Karoo region of South Africa. Launched in August of 2020, it’s a blended digital and botanical carbon offset program. 

ReSpek Nature’s service is designed to take the Spekboom planting opportunity to any consumer shopping online, via a pop-up, and who wants to help offset carbon against their purchase. 

In addition, anyone or any organization can offset their carbon according to their needs, via monthly subscriptions. 

ReSpek Nature’s mission simultaneously restores eroded semi-arid land, reintroduces nutrients back into the topsoil, sequesters carbon, locks hydrogen into the Spekboom thicket, and regenerates biodiversity with social impact. 

The Spekboom is broadly considered the most effective carbon sequester in the plant world, and it grows in its endemic environment, which is the semi-desert Karoo. The Karoo, as you know, is particularly prone to the ravages of climate change. Once rooted, Spekboom doesn’t require water, in fact, it holds water in its leaves and stems and so combats drought. As the program scales, ReSpek Nature will provide more local jobs in a rural community where unemployment sits at approximately 60%. 

The market environment for the carbon offsetting movement is on the rise, and as governments, NGOs, corporates, and the public become evermore conscientized, the potential for growth for ReSpek increases exponentially. 

For our pilot phase, we have 56 hectares of land available. That would convert to approximately 480 carbon tonnes sequestered each year. Because the Spekboom has been proven scientifically to capture and store such inordinate amounts of carbon, large inter-governmental bodies have confirmed the value of planting out vast tracts of denuded land in the Karoo that would be suited for restoration.

To this end, UNEP (United Nations Environmental Programme) has officially supported the proposal of committing 1.2 million hectares of Karoo land for Spekboom planting. ReSpek Nature has initiated a collaboration with the head scientist, with the understanding that ReSpek would participate in that undertaking. We are confident that the demand will meet the supply.

ReSpek Nature, located in Graaff-Reinet, Eastern Cape, South Africa, was founded in August 2020 as a dedicated activation initiative within the larger and older Giant Flag project (www.giantflag.co.za), which was launched in late 2014. The purpose is multi-layered, which includes, for phase 1, fulfilling the 22 hectares of green in the Giant Flag, and so generating a carbon-offsetting spekboom plantation. This simultaneously restores the eroded semi-arid land, reintroduces nutrients back into the topsoil, locks hydrogen into the Spekboom thicket, and regenerates biodiversity. 

As the program scales, ReSpek Nature will provide more local jobs in a rural community where unemployment sits at approximately 60%, which is a primary socio-economic driver for the project.

The township communities in and around Graaff-Reinet have for generations been living on or below the poverty line. Jobs are scarce, many are uneducated or semi-literate, fetal alcohol syndrome is common, and hard, cheap drugs are pushed throughout the community. The rape and murder statistics equal the national levels, which are high, and the Gini coefficient is the highest in South Africa.

Ecologically, the Karoo is semi-arid, and while much of the preserved areas are healthy, many decades of bad farming practices and the land that makes up the municipal commonage—including the land where the Giant Flag is located, is overgrazed, denuded, and eroded. Spekboom, as the original endemic thicket, is an ideal approach to restoring balance to the damaged soil.

Politically, Graaff-Reinet is a microcosm of South Africa. As the fourth oldest town in the country, all the past inequities were—and still are—present in the community. The minority white population continues to thrive in comparison to the poor communities of color. 

The Camdeboo region, where Graff-Reinet is located, is one of the most disadvantaged regions of South Africa. According to the former Camdeboo Municipality’s Integrated Development Plan 2012-2017, the total population of the Camdeboo municipal area is approximately 50, 993 people of which approximately 50% of the people 20+ years, are 15% illiterate and 35%  have only a primary school education. 

Approximately 80% of the Camdeboo population has a monthly household income of less than R 3 200 and of this 80%, 42% of the population is dependent on welfare. These figures have doubled since 2007.

ReSpek Nature is focusing entirely on addressing the needs of the poorest of the poor, and it is from that group that we hire our staff, whom we train in plant growth and plant care.

Dr. Beyers Naude, the local municipality, and the provincial government do have programs to try to generate jobs, but the region is beset by bad management and a lack of resources. Karoo Catch, the fish farm in Adendorp, is possibly the closest venture we could consider as a private company attempting to alleviate local poverty.

The response to ReSpek Nature, both from our online support base, as well as the local workers planting the Spekboom, has been roundly very well received.

There is a growing global movement that focuses on the need to lower our carbon usage, across the board. It requires effort from those working in the built environment, as well as providing an opportunity for nature to assist in capturing and storing carbon. 

ReSpek Nature’s service is designed to take the Spekboom planting opportunity to any consumer shopping online, via a pop-up, and who wants to help offset carbon against their purchase. In addition, anyone or any organization can offset their carbon according to their needs, via monthly subscriptions. 

Through IoT and GIS, ReSpek Nature delivers a digital certificate to our supporters, who can then follow the growth of the plants over time. These are our products. The response to our early efforts has seen positive results, with the understanding that we could expand our reach considerably. As it stands, our conversion rate on Shopify is consistently increasing.

The final packaged product will have 4 components, 

1. The funding model, proportional to the carbon footprint that needs to be neutralized in commercial engagements.

2. An educational component to engage local communities in the benefits and knowledge of how Spekboom functions, and how ReSpek works.

3. The monitoring & evaluation of the plantations and remuneration of the green-collar workers that are engaged through our educational programming.

4. Reporting back to the customer and patrons with what we have achieved and giving them the benefit of the net-zero ecosystem we generate.

Community Engagement

As ReSpek Nature is focusing entirely on addressing the needs of the poorest of the poor, community upliftment is one of our core values. The community is engaged through a series of monthly activations, primarily focused on ‘planting days’. Here, our team on the ground invites anyone from their neighborhood or township to participate in a proactive, fun, educational experience by planting out thousands of spekboom in a matter of hours. One of our champions is the former town Mayor, Hanna Makoba, who is a hub in her Asherville Township, and beyond. She broadcasts the planting days and encourages young people to attend. 

Also included is the team from SANParks who are utilizing these days as an educational program for the local school children. They come and learn about spekboom and the ecosystem services the succulent brings to their natural environment. 

Everyone gathers early at the Mother Flag, the pilot site of the Giant Flag, and also the base of ReSpek’s propagation nursery. They gather up the thousands of baby, rooted spekboom, stack the Jeeps and start the move over to the green ‘Y’ in the Giant Flag, about 300 meters away, to start planting. Often there is laughter and chatter that accompanies the hard physical work of digging the holes, planting the spekboom, and their first (and only) watering.   

Social Impact

In collaboration with SANParks (South African National Parks) on our Eastern border, ReSpek Nature runs an educational program with local school children and volunteers from the township. Every few weeks they gather on ‘planting days’ to learn about Spekboom and the ecosystem services that the natural environment provides. In addition, ReSpek has trained our project manager, Thobs, how to drive, she secured a license and we provided her with a Jeep, and now she can carry plants, people, and supplies to and from the site. This point of empowerment has already had a positive ripple effect in the community. 

Environmental Impact

The Karoo is a semi-arid region, and being in the southern hemisphere makes it that much more vulnerable to the potential ravages of climate change. Spekboom, an endemic species to the Karoo thicket biome, can fundamentally help shift the local environment to its former healthy state. By capturing carbon, as well as retaining water in its stems and leaves, on-scale micro-climates can develop which could have an everlasting impact on the region. We are socializing the local communities to understand this, and they are starting to view the Spekboom thicket as the ecological hero that it is.

Economic Impact

ReSpek Nature has a robust marketing strategy already in place, specifically, because it has the pro bono backing of the Nahana Foundation, the nonprofit arm of creative agency Nahana Communications Group. Nahana has helped develop the brand as well as a communications map that addresses all the relevant social media channels, as well as merchant platforms where the ReSpek Nature app would feature. As it stands, ReSpek is already listed and active as a nonprofit carbon offset vendor on Shopify. Similar merchant platforms will follow, where online stores can easily add on the ReSpek app.

ReSPek Nature is a technology-based solution that can help communities restore, sustain, and benefit from resilient ecosystems. ReSpek Nature’s mission simultaneously restores eroded semi-arid land, reintroduces nutrients back into the topsoil, sequesters carbon, locks hydrogen into the Spekboom thicket, and regenerates biodiversity. As the program scales, ReSpek Nature will provide more local jobs in a rural community where unemployment sits at approximately 60%. ReSPek Nature's solution meets all the criteria for the challenge at hand:

• Preserve and restore carbon-rich ecosystems and biodiversity hotspots, whether terrestrial, coastal, or marine.

• Provide scalable and verifiable monitoring and data collection to track ecosystem conditions, such as biodiversity, carbon stocks, or productivity.

• Aggregate local projects to enable access to financial capital for ecosystem services such as natural hazard mitigation, water quality, and carbon storage.

• Create scalable economic opportunities for local communities, including fishing, timber, tourism, and regenerative agriculture, that are aligned with thriving and biodiverse ecosystems 

We may not be the first to market in terms of ‘easy access’ carbon offsetting, but what makes our offering unique is that we are a direct link between the consumer who aspires to net zero, and the Spekboom plantation itself. 

Furthermore, this involves a rural community on the ground who are working on the project, and who are set to benefit the most. On the one hand the effort toward climate change mitigation, and on the other they benefit by providing on-the-ground service of planting the spekboom, providing them with paid and long term work. 

The digitization of ReSpek Nature also creates an international community of conscious consumers and home-bound activists who want to make a difference. We can guide them to our merchants who are themselves moving toward net-zero. Creating and giving access to a net-zero market, consumers who want to spend responsibly, and businesses that want to provide responsive services to their customers, it's the ReSpek-table thing to do.

The ReSpek mandate and mission address what most offset projects don’t: the focus on arid regions and plants that support those environs, the net effect is much greater than planting trees in already forested areas. By reintroducing a plant like the Spekboom to an eroded tract of land, the ecology can be transformed and become far more sustainable. It attracts further biodiversity and improves the quality and ability of the land itself to support more life, and this is aside from the essential carbon sequestration. 

Our ability to provide automated digital tools to verify planting and paying the individuals on the ground is what allows the project to scale beyond a single top-down approach to plantation management. 

Our model also allows for incremental growth and scaling as resources become available, instead of waiting for large sums of money to get things moving.

The added impact of our first project which is essentially a drop in the ocean toward regenerating all the lost Spekboom thicket across South Africa - will allow us to collaborate and engage with local communities, strategic partners, and aligned projects by replicating this model into a franchise-like structure.  

Current number: 2,500 customers 4 staff

1 year: 30,000 customers 15 staff on the ground

5 years: 40,000 customers 30 staff on the ground

We have currently sold 36,000 Spekboom and have currently planted 5,000 of the Spekboom. We currently have 12 e-commerce merchants signed up and our conversion rates in terms of sales using our pop-up app are sitting at 14.5%. 

Respek Nature currently employs 4 full-time staff.

Each of us plays an important role: 

Guy Lieberman is the founder visionary behind the larger social enterprise of the Giant Flag, bringing creativity, culture, environment, and commerce together under a unified project. Guy has also coordinated the commitment of the Giant Flag partners, including a communications agency, government departments, the South African National Parks, universities, the local municipality, several corporate sponsors, and even a satellite sponsor. Some of these partners see the deep relevance of ReSpek Nature as activation and a path forward for the spekboom and carbon offset offering. 

Ephraim Moss, the Giant Flag webmaster, had been managing the digital platform for a couple of years. It was then that Guy and Ephraim experienced the ‘Aha’ moment: how do we give consumers the opportunity to offset their carbon footprint at the point of online purchase, and do so while providing direct access, transparency, and accountability that underscores the service we offer? Our focus until now has been designing a sustainable business model that offers a carbon offset platform as a service for a return and simultaneously helps to mitigate climate change. 

And so ReSpek Nature was born. Ephraim is overseeing the digital platform to provide a carbon offsetting service across e-commerce platforms and beyond, in both the online and in-person worlds.

Our woman on the ground, Thobeka Theo (Thobs) Booysen is our partner in managing all aspects of the project in Graff-Reinet. 

Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) and Respek Nature

Black Economic Empowerment (BEE)9 is a South African Government policy that encourages companies to assist in the de-racialization of South Africa’s economy and in fast-tracking the entry of historically disadvantaged individuals into business.  The policy seeks to encourage companies to engage in activities that benefit black people. In this context “black” is defined as black, colored, or Indian people who are South African citizens by birth or who became a citizen before 27  August 1994. 

The extent to which the project will need to satisfy the government's BEE requirements is dependent on the annual turnover that is generated by the venture. If the enterprise generates less than R5 million annual turnover, then it is an  Exempt Micro Enterprise (EME) and is automatically awarded a scorecard of 65  points (a level 4 rating) and exempt from going through the process of filling out the scorecard. If the enterprise generates an annual turnover between R5 million and R35 million, then although it may require a scorecard, it is defined as a QSE  (Qualifying Small Enterprise) and it needs to achieve any four of the seven elements of the QSE scorecard. Enterprises generating an annual turnover of more than R35 million would be required to achieve all seven elements on the generic scorecard. The generic and the QSE scorecards contain the same seven elements,  but these elements are weighted differently in each scorecard. 

These are the seven elements: 

1. Ownership – this measures the percentage of shares in the business that are  owned by black people (as per the definition above) 

2. Management – the directors and top management of the business 3. Employment equity – the employees in the business 

4. Skills development – this measures the amount of money spent on training of  black employees 

5. Procurement – suppliers and their scores 

6. Enterprise Development – expenditure on helping other black-owned  enterprises 

7. Socio-Economic Development – expenditure on assisting charitable organizations  

With the objects of ReSpek Nature in mind, it would be very easy to comply with the elements of the scorecard and achieve a very high mark in terms of BEE  compliance. We are focused on building a racially diverse and inclusive team comprised, led by the BEE mandate. 

The opportunity to engage with others who have experience in building out innovative new models is invaluable. Now, at this critical time in our history where we have the know-how and foresight to truly affect change on a global scale, and remedy the consequences of thoughtless actions. We want to ensure a safe, secure, and thriving world that will positively impact those generations that will follow ours.  This opportunity would be a real step to leverage this unique feature of our species, for the good.