Google, McKinsey and Tencent Commit 635,000 Tonnes to Sulawesi Restoration Project

Thryve.Earth has announced its first corporate offtake commitments for a 6,000-hectare land restoration project in Sulawesi, Indonesia, with Symbiosis Coalition members Google and McKinsey contracting over 335,000 tonnes of carbon removal over 10 years and Tencent committing 300,000 tonnes, together totalling 635,000 tonnes. The deal marks Symbiosis Coalition's first agroforestry commitment and Tencent's first carbon offtake agreement outside China. The project will restore degraded land through fruit and timber trees intended to store carbon while generating lasting income for local communities.

 

Why Sulawesi's Degradation Creates Both an Opportunity and a Challenge

 

Sulawesi is described as one of the most biodiverse and carbon-rich regions globally, but the release states it has been degraded by shifting agriculture, soil erosion and invasive species, producing fire-prone grasslands and depleted soils that leave smallholder farmers struggling to sustain their livelihoods. That combination, high underlying ecological value paired with active degradation, is precisely the profile that makes restoration projects both environmentally significant and commercially complex: the potential carbon and biodiversity upside from restoring degraded land is substantial, but degraded soils and invasive species also mean restoration requires more upfront intervention than simply protecting an already-intact forest.

Thryve's model, restoring landscapes through fruit and timber trees planted in a layered system, targets this specific challenge by combining ecological restoration with an income-generating structure for the smallholder farmers whose land is being restored, rather than treating restoration purely as a conservation exercise separate from local livelihoods.

 

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Why Long-Term Offtake Commitments Are the Financing Mechanism That Unlocks This Work

 

The release is explicit about a specific financial bottleneck: the upfront cost of clearing invasive grasses and establishing new trees exceeds what individual landowners can bear alone, making long-term offtake commitments critical to unlocking the financing needed to deliver restoration at this scale. That framing mirrors the underlying logic behind the Frontier Infrastructure BECCS deal and the Mombak Amazon reforestation delivery covered elsewhere in this batch: carbon removal buyers committing to purchase future credits over a multi-year period gives project developers the revenue certainty needed to secure financing for capital-intensive restoration work upfront, rather than requiring landowners or developers to fund the work speculatively and hope buyers materialise once credits are eventually generated.

Thryve's model builds specifically on decades of field-tested restoration work by the Masarang Foundation, associated with Dr. Willie Smits, giving the underlying agroforestry approach a longer track record than a newly designed methodology would carry, a detail relevant to assessing whether the restoration techniques themselves are proven or still being validated at this scale.

 

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Why the "First of Its Kind" Framing Matters for Both Buyers

 

Symbiosis Coalition executive director Julia Strong described the long-term offtake commitments from coalition members as giving Thryve the certainty needed to build at scale, framing the transaction as exactly the kind of signal the carbon removal market needs. That framing positions this deal similarly to the earlier Mombak transaction covered in this batch, both cases treated as proof points intended to demonstrate that credible, well-financed restoration and reforestation projects can attract institutional buyer commitment at meaningful scale, addressing longstanding market credibility concerns.

This being Symbiosis's first agroforestry commitment specifically extends the coalition's portfolio beyond pure reforestation into a model that explicitly combines carbon storage with ongoing agricultural income for local communities, a structural difference from planting forest purely for carbon value. Tencent's participation marking its first offtake agreement outside China similarly signals the company extending its carbon removal purchasing beyond its domestic market for the first time, tied explicitly by Tencent's Hao Xu to the company's stated "Tech for Good" positioning.

 

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What Determines Whether This Delivers on Its Stated Promise

 

Thryve's co-founders, Vinay Kulkarni and Ron Steinherz, framed the commitments as allowing the company to scale decades of proven restoration work with institutional rigour while keeping communities at the centre of the model, language that reflects an intent to avoid the criticism levelled at some carbon removal or reforestation projects that have prioritised carbon accounting over genuine community benefit or ecological outcomes. Whether the layered agroforestry system delivers the diversified farmer income the release describes as often exceeding standalone carbon revenues, and whether the 6,000 hectares of restoration proceed at the pace and quality needed to deliver the committed 635,000 tonnes over the coming decade, will determine whether this project validates the same kind of buyer confidence in nature-based restoration that recent successful early deliveries elsewhere in the sector have begun to build.