Burying Namibia's Bush: Tivano Carbon's Underground Bet on Carbon Removal

On October 14, a Zurich-based climate startup won about $600,000 in Swiss public money to scale one of the most literal ideas in carbon removal: cut down the invasive thickets overrunning Namibia's grasslands, and bury the evidence underground. Tivano Carbon's CHF 500,000 grant from REPIC, the Swiss platform that funds knowledge and technology transfer to developing and transition countries, will push its Dragonfly project from demonstration toward large-scale deployment and accelerate construction of its first carbon vault under a second effort, Project Butterfly.

The sum is small by climate-tech standards. The signal is not. Public development money flowing into a durable carbon removal method that stores carbon in buried biomass for more than a century marks how quickly the voluntary carbon market is reorganizing itself around removals that can be measured, monitored, and trusted. Tivano already has the receipts to show why it belongs in that conversation: more than 1,000 tonnes of CO2 removed, 120 hectares of land restored, and 1,049 removal credits certified through Puro.earth.

The bush encroachment problem

Namibia's grasslands have a woody problem. Bush encroachment, the dense, aggressive spread of native trees and shrubs into open savannas and rangelands at the expense of grasses and the herbaceous layer, has swallowed vast tracts of the country's grazing land over decades. The standard response is unglamorous and counterproductive: excess biomass is burned or poisoned, sending its carbon straight back to the atmosphere.

Tivano's approach turns that waste stream into a carbon asset. Working with local partners, it selectively removes the unwanted woody vegetation, processes it, and seals it in physical underground vaults fitted with sensors for continuous monitoring. The vaults are designed to prevent decomposition and carbon release for centuries, while the cleared land lets native grasses and savanna ecosystems recover. The company says the work also supports employment and economic activity in the region.

This is the biomass-storage school of carbon removal, one of the younger branches of the durable-removal family. Unlike direct air capture machines that filter CO2 from ambient air at enormous energy cost, biomass storage rides on photosynthesis: the trees already did the capturing. The trick is making the storage permanent. If the buried biomass decomposes, it releases CO2 or methane, and the climate benefit evaporates. Tivano's answer is engineering plus verification: sealed underground structures, continuous sensor monitoring, and certification under Puro.earth's Terrestrial Storage of Biomass methodology, which carries a 100-plus-year durability standard.

What the pilot has proven

Tivano was founded in Zurich in 2024 and is currently enrolled in the ETH startup accelerator UPortunity, sponsored by UBS. It has spent its first two years proving the concept on the ground. Its Dragonfly project in Namibia has restored 120 hectares of encroached land and removed more than 1,000 tonnes of CO2, earning 1,049 carbon removal credits through Puro.earth.

Those credits matter more than the tonnage. They are independently certified under a methodology demanding 100-plus years of storage, placing them in the durable-removal tier that corporate buyers now chase as the market pivots away from the cheap, low-integrity offsets that damaged the voluntary carbon market's reputation. A thousand tonnes is a rounding error against the gigatonnes the IPCC says the world will need to remove. But certified, monitored, century-durable tonnes are the currency the market is learning to price.

Burying wood sounds primitive. But if the vaults hold and the monitoring stays honest, it could be one of the cheapest ways to keep carbon out of the air for a century.

Why a Swiss development grant matters

REPIC is not a climate fund in the venture sense. It backs Swiss knowledge and technology transfer to developing and transition countries, with a mandate centered on renewable energy, energy efficiency, and resource efficiency. That Tivano's project met its funding criteria puts a form of official development-policy approval behind biomass-storage carbon removal. For a sector that has spent years begging for demand certainty, public institutions validating the method is a milestone, even if the check is modest.

Namibia, meanwhile, is becoming something of a hotspot for the approach. A guest analysis on the Geoengineering Monitor platform reported that in August, two German companies, Carbonsate and Senken, announced a large biomass storage deal in Namibia's Otjozondjupa region, near Otjiwarongo, close to Tivano's own operations. The cluster effect cuts both ways: shared learning and infrastructure on one side, harder questions about who benefits when European companies lock up African land for carbon on the other.

The questions that come with burial

Not everyone is cheering. Biomass storage's permanence claims rest on engineering and monitoring, and critics note that if a vault seal fails years from now, decomposition could release CO2 or methane long after the credits were sold and retired. The same Geoengineering Monitor analysis, written by Biofuelwatch's Almuth Ernsting, went further, framing biomass burial projects in Namibia as neocolonial resource exploitation: European firms using African land and labor to produce offsets for Western polluters, with little recourse if storage fails after the credits change hands.

These are serious governance questions, and they apply to the whole durable-removal market, not just Tivano. Who owns the land and the revenue? How do host communities share in the value? Who verifies the vaults, and what happens if monitoring reveals a leak decades from now? The market's answer so far is standards: methodologies with durability requirements and monitoring protocols are the guardrails between a genuine climate service and greenwash. Tivano's 1,049 certified credits put it on the right side of that line for now. But certification is a beginning, not an end: the vaults have to hold for longer than the startup's current runway.

What comes next

The REPIC money funds the unglamorous middle of the scaling curve: turning the Dragonfly demonstration into a replicable operational model, and getting the first Butterfly vault built. That translation, from pilot tonnes to a deployment playbook, is where carbon removal companies typically live or die. If Tivano can show that each vault stores carbon predictably, monitors reliably, and restores rangeland that local communities value, it has a template that travels. Bush encroachment is a problem across sub-Saharan Africa, and so is the appetite of corporate buyers for durable, affordable removal.

The question is no longer whether burying biomass can work. It is whether it can work at scale, under scrutiny, and with the people who live on the land getting their share.