Google, McKinsey Buy 320,000 Tons of Carbon Removal Credits From Brazil Silvopasture Project

Google and McKinsey have agreed to buy 320,000 metric tons of carbon removal credits over 10 years from Working Trees, a company that plants trees on cattle pasture in Brazil. The Symbiosis Coalition announced the long-term purchase agreements on Monday, Oct. 19.

Working Trees is converting degraded cattle pasture into mixed-species systems across Brazil’s southeastern Amazon and Cerrado regions. The offtake deals will help fund the restoration of 8,700 hectares of degraded and semi-degraded pastureland, part of a broader 50,000-hectare project, and Reuters called it one of the first attempts to deploy carbon-funded silvopasture at a larger scale. Google said in a blog post that its share covers 270,000 tons of carbon dioxide removal.

Silvopasture integrates trees into cattle pastures, so ranching can continue while the land stores more carbon and there is less pressure to clear forest. Working Trees plants rows of commercial timber, such as African mahogany and teak, alongside native species directly into existing pasture, leaving space between the rows for cattle to graze. The company says the model improves cattle productivity and creates future timber revenue, which gives landowners a reason to keep the trees after carbon-credit income declines.

Coalition backed by big tech buyers

The Symbiosis Coalition, whose members include Google, Microsoft, Meta and Salesforce, focuses on long-term carbon offset contracts and has pledged more than 20 million tons of offsets by 2030, Reuters reported. This is the coalition’s first silvopasture project. Its earlier deals include reforestation projects with Living Carbon and Mombak and an agroforestry project with Thryve.Earth.

Leif Gonzales-Kramer, chief executive of Working Trees, said the long-term purchase commitments were critical to unlocking investment for such projects. “If you believe that the world will continue to eat beef and that the world will take climate action seriously, the only way that you can actually achieve both at the same time is through silvopasture,” he told Reuters.

Randy Spock, Google’s head of carbon removal, called it “a scalable, tech-driven approach that benefits both global carbon removal and local farming livelihoods.” Working Trees uses a smartphone-based system that lets landowners and field workers record each tree’s location, size and species with their phone cameras. Each record carries photos, GPS coordinates and timestamps, which the coalition said creates an auditable trail for carbon verification.

Technology companies are looking for ways to offset emissions tied to the rapid build-out of energy-intensive AI infrastructure, according to Reuters, which also noted that some critics say offsets let polluters avoid cutting their own emissions.