Action-oriented climate optimism toward a thriving planet. This is our home world.

Why biotech?

Our climate problem has deep roots in biology. Growth of food, health of soil, and stability of ecosystems are all intrinsically biological. The fossil resources we use to make fuel, materials, and chemicals all originate from organisms. The flux of the carbon cycle is dominated by biological processes. And even the slow carbon cycle, which moves carbon from the atmosphere and oceans into rock on geologic timescales, is catalyzed by living things.

The mechanisms underlying those processes can be purposed toward a healthy planet and human way of life.

Many biologists originally studied biology because they love the life that evolved here on Earth, and many biotechnologists studied biotech because they wanted to improve human lives. We are seeing that this same care for life is now motivating many biologists – including ourselves – to work toward a thriving future for all of life in the face of global climate change.

Through our own journeys, we have identified three core theses and corresponding focus areas that guide our efforts to enable the climate biotech community to reach its potential for impact.

Homeworld theses:

A growing number of people want to work in climate biotech, but are hindered by a lack of collaborators and clear direction.

Initial ideas need support getting off the ground — especially those of people who are talented but new to working in the field of climate biotech.

As an emerging field, climate biotech needs intellectual infrastructure such as guiding principles, established paths to impact and community knowledge to help us prioritize and solve problems.

Our Focus:

Community building

A community is a network of meaningful connections and joint interests. Homeworld Collective fosters the growth of the emerging climate biotech community by supporting relationship development, sharing common challenges, and co-creating knowledge.

Thought leadership

Where is the go-to knowledge for biotechnologists trying to make planetary-scale impact? We skip the paywalls and siloed career tracks to produce community knowledge that accelerates all of us in our journeys to build climate-positive technologies.

Catalyzing action

Let’s get good ideas into motion as quickly as possible, and learn together while we’re at it. We fund technology development and translatable research in climate biotech, using an open review process that generates community knowledge while refining actionable projects.

Our journey

In graduate school, initially inspired by the challenge of atmospheric carbon dioxide removal, we saw that climate change presented a series of technological challenges that we could actually work on. Encouraged by the hyperproductivity of the medical biotech community, we were determined to apply the tools of synthetic biology and genomics to emerging problems in climate. We formed an oddball ‘climate change subgroup’ in the neurotechnology lab where we did our PhDs. However, we lacked the collaborators and community knowledge of problems and paths to impact that we had enjoyed in medical biotech. That made it hard to identify the right projects and get started. As we traversed our personal paths and met others along the way, we learned that those problems are faced systemically in climate biotech.

We started Homeworld Collective in 2023 to serve the needs of our community by developing the social, intellectual, and funding infrastructure needed for the young field of climate biotech to become as hyperproductive as the exemplar fields of medical biotech and machine learning.