In its latest purchase of carbon dioxide removal credits, Microsoft has agreed to buy 350,000 CDRs over six years from an agroforestry project in Kenya, the company that financed the venture said on Wednesday.

Catona Climate said the Lake Victoria Watershed Agroforestry Project prevents deforestation and biodiversity loss by developing "forest gardens" on lands owned by some 15,000 smallholders in Homa Bay, Kenya.

The project is being funded, designed and managed by Catona with its nonprofit partner Trees for the Future, the company said in a news release.

Brian Marrs, senior director for energy and carbon removal at Microsoft, said that beyond removing carbon, the project also supports biodiversity and benefits local communities.

The deal is the latest in a series of CDR purchase agreements Microsoft has signed over the past few months and comes a week after the technology giant agreed to buy 27,600 CDRs over six years from Swiss startup Neustark.

Several weeks earlier, the company struck a deal with carbon removals solutions provider Grassroots Carbon to buy an undisclosed amount of soil-based CDRs over 30 years.

That deal was announced a month after Microsoft agreed to buy 362,000 CDRs over 15 years from nature-based carbon removal developer Chestnut Carbon.

As with the previous deals, no financial details of the Kenya agreement were disclosed.

Microsoft has committed to become a carbon-negative company by 2030. It has also vowed to remove all the carbon the company has emitted since its founding in 1975 by the middle of the century.


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--Reporting by Abdul Latheef, alatheef@opisnet.com; Editing by Jeff Barber, jbarber@opisnet.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

02-21-24 1043ET