De Beers Group Net Positive Impact Biodiversity Programme — Okavango Eternal & Southern Africa Conservation Estate

De Beers Group states that its ecology teams have managed nature reserves in Southern Africa for more than 130 years and, through the 2021 'Okavango Eternal' partnership with the National Geographic Society, focus on protecting the headwaters of the Okavango Delta across Angola, Namibia and Botswana. Company and trade-press reporting put the area under company-linked conservation management at 377,000 acres as of the 2024 sustainability report — described as roughly two acres protected for every one used in mining and home to 15 endangered species — rising to a reported 500,000-acre network across South Africa and Botswana by 2025.

Concrete cited actions include translocating 10 white rhinos from a Botswana game reserve to a South African reserve as part of a regional rewilding effort, and funding a seabird rescue facility in Namibia to support the Critically Endangered African Penguin. De Beers' public target is to secure three times more land than it impacts and help protect a further 13 million acres by 2030 — a goal the company itself describes as aiming to be 'on an externally validated path to nature-positive outcomes by 2030', implying that validation is not yet complete.

Independent scrutiny of these claims is limited. An EcoWatch investigation found that De Beers' 'Building Forever' sustainability reporting is 'scrutinized only by the company's own stakeholders, not outside authorities who can verify the information presented', and separately documented a De Beers mine manager's own admission that decades of phytoremediation attempts on older diamond-mine waste dumps had failed to establish vegetation. No third-party certification body, peer-reviewed audit or government verification of the headline acreage and species figures was found in the sources reviewed, making this a case where ambition and self-reported scale currently outpace independently evidenced outcomes.

Read the full analysis: https://www.debeersgroup.com/sustainability/nature