SpekTech

We have identified marginalised and vulnerable communities in semi-arid climates that are negatively affected by climate change and would benefit from participating in the carbon market. 

However, the costs for farmers and landowners to participate in the carbon market are prohibitively high. The cost to produce a carbon credit in semi-arid regions allows for only very tight margins. 

From the time of initiating a restoration project until revenue can be generated from carbon credits, there's a funding gap of between 5-8 years.  Our model helps to fund this gap and reduce the cost of producing carbon credits and initiating land restoration projects. 

It is estimated that 100 tonnes of carbon per hectare is being lost to the atmosphere every year in the South African Karoo. Due to bad farming practices and overstocking of goats and sheep, there are currently more than 1.2 million hectares of degraded and denuded spekboom thicket in the Little Karoo region of South Africa.

Degradation of this semi-arid biome is associated with severe reductions in biodiversity and ecological functioning, negatively impacting the regions 75,000 inhabitants. It is estimated that 90% of the thicket biome has suffered moderate to severe degradation of this form. 

Degraded habitats do not recover after the removal of livestock, and active measures are required to restore ecosystem health. 

Fortunately, restoration of the desertified land and the recapturing of atmospheric carbon can be achieved in a sustainable manner by planting cuttings of the common indigenous tree Portulacaria afra known as spekboom. 

Spekboom is unusually effective at sequestering carbon for a semi-arid region plant, which has obvious significance for climate change mitigation. 

Until now, key stakeholders in the Karoo restoration ecosystem have been working in silos, without a tech-driven approach to scale restoration efforts.  In order to carry out a large-scale restoration project, and reduce planting costs by locating ideal landscapes, remote sensing technology must be utilised. 

Without financially viable mechanisms to monitor and measure carbon, sustainable revenue streams and technology designed to share knowledge of best practices, the opportunity to restore this vital ecosystem and improve the lives of it's inhabitants will be unattainable.

The Spektech platform:

1) Generates revenue through our e-commerce integrations to offset the high costs of land restoration 

2) Creates viable ROIs for farmers to enter the carbon market.

3) Allows for economic stimulation and job creation in depressed communities and uses remote sensing and machine learning to reduce the cost of calculating carbon credits and ensuring transparency 

Our vision is to apply our model to similar biomes, as well as traditional reforestation projects globally. 

An application of this technology in semi-arid regions has never been attempted before.

The key co-benefits for nature and people arising from our project include reducing carbon emissions, restoring the natural ecosystem, and creating dignified jobs in rural communities. Additionally, our platform also allows online consumers and corporations to take direct, meaningful climate action with every online purchase, providing an easy way for people to be part of the solution.

Rural Communities: The Karoo is a harsh environment, and it takes a robust labor force to work the land. The majority of the population is uneducated or semi-literate. Gender-based violence is rife and communities are plagued by alcoholism, as well as many other social ills brought on by rural poverty. While township communities in the Karoo have for generations been living on or below the poverty line, (with the Gini coefficient in this region being the highest in South Africa,) increasing levels of poverty have exacerbated a myriad of challenges including food security. With more than 70% unemployment in the Karoo, the opportunity to bring a scalable and immediate income visa vi carbon farming would be catalytic. Creating green jobs in these regions would ensure a triple bottom line impact and serve to uplift entire ecosystems, including the family unit by ensuring dignified work over generations.

Landowners: are key stakeholders in the economic value chain for SpekTech. There are very few ways for landowners to commercialise the dry and sparse Karoo land. Another critical impact would be lowering the barriers to entry into the carbon market and land restoration, by allowing land owners to access another source of income which would not not ordinarily be accessible without a large capital outlay. The introduction of a carbon market can work to reinvigorate these local communities and the Karoo economy, with the added value of restoring land and increasing its carrying capacity. Restored land will increase productivity and ROI for the landowners, allow for them to benefit as stakeholders as well as regenerate biodiversity.

Merchants and retailers, both online and brick and mortar, are in a position to close the circle between the consumers, the ReSpek digital platform, and those on the ground planting spekboom. These retailers will benefit both through increasing their ESG scores, as well as the optics of how their association with ReSpek will show them to be aware of the global issues of climate change and the race to net-zero.

Global organisations and corporations that are mandated to address climate change will also be able to note the scale, impact, and the potential of the ecosystem restoration opportunity in the Karoo. In addition, the socioeconomics around the carbon capture project is being placed high on the list of criteria. If a nature-based carbon capture reforestation initiative disturbs or negatively impacts the human settlements in the area, then funding from these international NGOs will likely not be forthcoming. By addressing and including a beneficial socioeconomic strategy into the carbon project, the social and economic impacts are informed by social upliftment and ethical development strategies.

Our tech team combines the expertise of local environmental scientists & botanists, regional land restoration specialists, carbon capture data aggregators, software engineers, and blockchain experts who share a vision and mission alignment for the restoration of the Karoo, our “speksperts”. Together, we ensure that planting programs for spekboom in the Karoo will be financially and environmentally sustainable in order to fast-track successful land restoration and carbon sequestration. 

Part of our team specialise in geospatial data science. We are building on a foundation of existing work, including Above Ground Carbon (AGC) estimation from satellite imagery at a farm-scale, mapping spekboom canopy cover at a regional-scale and a proof of concept for extending AGC estimation to the biome. 

Our planting partners are well-established within local rural communities in the Karoo and support our marketing, technological development, R&D efforts, and fulfil the rollout of the planting operations on the ground, ensuring that this critical restoration of the Karoo occurs in our lifetime.

The Karoo is an arid to semiarid geographic region of Eastern Cape, Western Cape, and Northern Cape provinces, South Africa. With more than 70% unemployment in the Karoo, spekboom planting for carbon capture and land restoration can unlock an entirely new job market for its 75,000 inhabitants.

1) Legal Barriers: In previous spekboom plantations overseen by a group of scientists who have planted hundreds of plots across the Karoo over two decades, they engaged the farmers to commit to caring for these plots. In fact, the farmers were paid for this service and the use of their land. When drought struck, however, the agreement was ignored when the farmers understood that their livestock could survive by eating the spekboom. This is a challenge that we need to address through a combination of direct communications, and underscored by legal contracts tied to the associated economic incentives. 

2) Access to ESG Funding: The digital carbon offset market is becoming a crowded space, and the thin verification of these programs has resulted in some fallout, including some of the airline carbon offset programs being considered fraudulent. The verification of the project itself; the work itself is done, as well as the quantification of the carbon being sunk, is a challenge to be addressed as well as the current high costs to become an accredited carbon offset project.

3) Market Access: Our marketing focus is on how to most effectively engage our client base, being two primary target groups: the online merchants who would adopt our add-on to their payment processes, via a Shopify or similar platform; and the conscious consumer who will either contribute to the various points of purchase or pay for a monthly subscription. As well as organisations that work on the ground locally in South Africa and other parts of the world in similar biomes.

4)  Software engineering and data science: With the advancement of LLM and transformers, working with researchers at MIT to help advance our technology and improve accuracy would be a huge advantage.

5) Marketing Analyst/Online Advertising Strategist: to access the various channels in the market from merchant to consumer to various stakeholder in the online e-commerce pipeline from payment to logistics to delivery and to identify key market segments for model integration. 

SpekTech's innovation lies in its holistic approach, combining e-commerce, remote sensing, and machine learning technologies to optimize land restoration and carbon farming in semi-arid regions. By connecting diverse stakeholders and focusing on transparency and accountability, our platform encourages collaboration, drives technological innovation, and expands the carbon market. 

Focus on semi-arid regions: Our solution specifically targets semi-arid regions, which are particularly vulnerable to the effects of climate change and land degradation. By concentrating on this niche, we can drive significant impact and help restore these critical ecosystems.

Cutting-edge technology: SpekTech leverages remote sensing and machine learning technologies to optimize carbon farming and land restoration in semi-arid regions. This allows us to significantly reduce the cost of producing carbon credits, making land restoration projects more financially viable and scalable.

This unique combination of features makes land restoration more financially viable and scalable, leading to a healthier planet and a more sustainable future.

Next year's impact goals:

1. Restore 100 hectares of degraded land in the Karoo by planting 200000 spekboom trees.
2. Create 200 jobs in rural communities involved in restoration projects.
3. Engage 50,000 individual and corporate customers in carbon offsetting and restoration efforts.

• Enhance and expand our platform's features, user base, and partner network.
• Increase marketing and outreach efforts to attract more customers and donors.
• Collaborate with local communities, farmers, and environmental organizations to execute restoration projects.

Five-year impact goals:
1. Restore 10000 hectares of degraded land in the Karoo and other semi-arid regions globally.
2. Create 200 jobs in rural communities across multiple regions
3. Sequester 200,000 tons of CO2 through spekboom planting
4. Engage 200,000 individual and corporate customers in carbon offsetting and restoration efforts.

• Refine our technology to improve scalability and cost-efficiency.
• Expand our operations to other semi-arid regions, both within South Africa and internationally.
• Collaborate with governments and international organizations to develop supportive policies and funding mechanisms.
• Build a strong global brand and community around our platform to inspire and mobilize more people and businesses in the fight against climate change.

1. Hectares of degraded land restored: This indicator tracks the total area of land restored through our restoration projects, contributing to our overall goal of restoring degraded ecosystems in semi-arid regions.

2. Number of spekboom trees planted: This indicator measures the number of spekboom trees planted through our platform, directly contributing to CO2 sequestration and ecosystem restoration.

3. Tons of CO2 sequestered: We use remote sensing and machine learning technologies to estimate the amount of CO2 sequestered through our restoration projects, which helps us assess our progress towards climate change mitigation goals.

4. Number of jobs created in rural communities: This indicator tracks the number of job opportunities generated through our restoration projects, contributing to local economic development and poverty reduction.

5. Number of individual and corporate customers engaged: This indicator measures the reach and impact of our platform by tracking the number of people and businesses participating in carbon offsetting and restoration efforts through SpekTech.

6. Revenue generated: Tracking our revenue helps us assess the financial sustainability of our platform and the effectiveness of our business model in generating resources to support our impact goals.

These indicators align with several UN Sustainable Development Goals, including SDG 13 (Climate Action), SDG 15 (Life on Land), and SDG 8 (Decent Work and Economic Growth).

The core of our technological solution focuses on mapping, monitoring, and measuring restoration and nature-based carbon capture in semi-arid regions. The solution combines space-based instrumentation with AI algorithms to calculate sequestered carbon values, offering a process that is verified, peer-reviewed, and democratized at a significantly lower cost. The data and its sources are recorded and tracked on a public blockchain, providing credibility and transparency.

Our solution leverages satellite imagery and AI algorithms to map carbon captured through restoration. Carbon maps offer credibility and transparency to customers, allowing them to track restoration progress over time. These maps also assist with on-the-ground planning and monitoring of planting work. Verified estimates of sequestered carbon can generate tradable carbon credits, potentially funding further restoration efforts.

Over the next 2-3 years, we aim to extend these methods to work at the biome scale and ensure repeatability over time. AI will facilitate training machine learning algorithms, enabling the next generation to continue the work and encourage local involvement from both an investment and expertise perspective. This approach can be exported to other projects across the globe working in semi-arid regions.

The real novelty lies in combining different sources of ground truth and building and training ML models one on top of the other, verifying and tuning the models to accurately correlate allometry with lidar, high-resolution multi-spectrum drone and mobile collected imagery, and ultimately correlating with space-based multispectral imagery for accurate and scalable carbon measurement.

The imagery and AGC ground truth data will be used in a multi-scale approach to develop an AI model for estimating biome-wide AGC from satellite imagery. Initially, AGC ground truth data will train a model to estimate AGC from high-resolution UAV imagery at a farm-scale. The AGC output of the first step will then be used to build a second model for estimating AGC from satellite imagery at the scale of the biome. This first step scales the field ground truth (10m x 10m plots) up to be used with medium resolution (10m - 30m) satellite imagery for training the second-step model. The farm-scale model may also assist in reducing or replacing costly field work currently used for AGC ground truth sampling.

There have been two published methods that successfully use multi-spectral satellite images to estimate carbon over a small (farm scale) area at a particular point in time. The main research tasks left are how to extend these methods over space (to the biome), and time (to allow repeat measurements as restoration progresses). Some preliminary research looking into this new approach has brought encouraging results: (https://github.com/dugalh/exte... and https://www.researchgate.net/publication/349060473_Remote_sensing_of_aboveground_carbon_in_subtropical_thicket). To address the remaining research tasks,  more ground truth needs to be compiled (field sampling work as with the "conventional" approach).  At the same time, we could gather drone data for each plot, to investigate if there may be a way of replacing or reducing the conventional sampling with drone data (including LiDAR).

Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) and SpekTech

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, coloured, 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 organisations  

With the objects of SpekTech 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. 

SpekTech is a ClimateTech platform that accelerates ecosystem restoration, climate change adaptation, and carbon market development in semi-arid regions. Our business model is centred around leveraging technology to reduce the cost and effort required for carbon farming, create jobs in rural communities, and restore the natural ecosystem by planting spekboom in the semi-arid South African Karoo.

Our key customers and beneficiaries include landowners, farmers, project developers, NGOs, corporations, and individuals interested in contributing to land restoration, carbon offsetting, and promoting sustainable practices. Our platform offers a suite of products and services that cater to the diverse needs of our stakeholders.

1. Carbon Monitoring and Tracking Tech: SpekTech's remote sensing and machine learning technology allow landowners, farmers, and project developers to monitor and track land restoration efforts efficiently. This technology not only reduces the cost of producing carbon credits but also enables projects to generate more significant revenues, making them financially viable and scalable.

2. E-commerce Integrations: SpekTech's e-commerce integrations enable organisations and individuals to contribute to land restoration projects by purchasing spekboom or donating funds directly. By connecting consumers with restoration projects, our platform fosters transparency, accountability, and democratises the process of land restoration.

3. Carbon Credits and Offsets: SpekTech facilitates the sale of carbon credits generated from restoration projects to corporations and individuals seeking to offset their carbon emissions. The revenue generated from these sales can be used to fund further planting and restoration work, creating a sustainable and viable ecosystem.

Our business model is designed to provide value to our customers and beneficiaries by:

- Empowering landowners and farmers with tools and resources to monitor and manage their restoration projects effectively

- Connecting projects with individuals and organisations who can contribute financially to restoration efforts

- Facilitating the sale of carbon credits to generate sustainable revenue streams for restoration projects

- Ensuring transparency and accountability in the carbon offsetting and land restoration process

We reach our customers and beneficiaries through various channels, including point-of-sale integrations for online and offline merchants, rewards programs of financial services companies, eCommerce ecosystems, and partnerships with corporations, farmers' associations, and environmental organisations.

Our key activities include developing and maintaining our tech platform, collaborating with stakeholders in the land restoration ecosystem, and providing support services to our customers and beneficiaries. We work closely with partners and key stakeholders, including NGOs, government agencies, and corporations, to drive greater impact and scale our restoration efforts.

To run our activities, we require resources such as skilled personnel, finance, and access to land restoration projects, remote sensing data, and partnerships with relevant stakeholders.

Our cost structure consists of expenditures on research and development, ecosystem expansion, community engagement and job creation, marketing and customer acquisition, and partnerships and collaborations. 

As we scale up, our costs will increase, particularly in areas like technological development, marketing, and expanding our reach into other semi-arid regions.

1. Management and Licensing Fees (Donations): This revenue stream includes fees collected from organisations using SpekTech's technology.

2. Direct Carbon Credit Sales: Revenue is generated from the direct sale of carbon credits to corporate and individual consumers.

3. Management and Licensing Fees (Carbon Monitoring): Fees collected from farmers, landowners, and project developers using SpekTech's carbon monitoring and measurement technology.

4. E-commerce Integrations and Partnerships: Revenue generated from e-commerce platform integrations, partnerships with financial institutions, and other channel partners.

In connecting projects to consumers - our e-commerce efforts thus far have had 5%-7% conversion rate of consumers with pilot merchants.

With integrations into major ecommerce platforms we have secured 35 merchants. Today, over 10,000 conscious consumers are funding our pilot projects in South Africa. Over 40,000 trees sold through our platform. 

We have developed integrations for 4 of the largest e-commerce platforms and partnered with 2 large financial institutions in South Africa and several environmental organisations involved in restoration work.

We are currently in discussion with several landowners interested in participating in our platform.

Investec bank has purchased several hectares of spekboom. SEED Low Carbon Awarded us with a small grant.