Many of the biggest creative leaps start in a small, empowered community. Apple Computers started from the Homebrew Computer Club, the Deep Learning Revolution came from the ImageNet Challenge, and Bell Labs patent lawyers noticed that eating lunch with Henry Nyquist correlated with higher rates of invention. These well-known examples illustrate how ideas can grow exponentially when situated in the right environment. Less understood are ways to intentionally create the conditions that lead to bursts of progress.
Homeworld’s explicit mission is to grow the field of climate biotech. To us, fieldbuilding means fostering the conditions for group creativity in high-impact scientific areas in order to lay foundations for a thriving research community. We believe that biology’s potential for infinitely scalable, atomically precise technology is insufficiently tapped relative to its possible role in planetary health.
In our first year, Homeworld focused on mapping high-growth protein engineering technologies to high-impact problems in climate. Through this experience, including conversations with hundreds of practitioners, we’ve learned to see three foundational elements of a productive field: knowledge of open problems at the frontier, research to move the frontiers forward, and a community to feed knowledge and research back into each other. If any of those elements are missing, a field will be too slow or small to meet a moment as urgent as climate change. What we collectively need is a repeatable model for promoting growth in the mutually-reinforcing elements of knowledge, research and community. To do a good fieldbuilding experiment, we first need a focal point that we believe would benefit from targeted efforts.
The innovation in Fast Grants was not just about “Fast”, it was about building a lean structure to fill gaps. In March 2020, the gap was that the NIH couldn’t move at the speed of a global pandemic. From our experience [as of September 2023] , the gaps in climate biotech are research funding gaps to de-risk ambitious translational ideas, knowledge gaps about the key open problems, and community gaps between excellent people who would be more productive if they collaborated. We must invest in community-scale productivity while also supporting specific projects onto successful journeys.
“How can funding change a field?,” a blog post from Homeworld announcing the inaugural Garden Grants funding program.
Today, we’re announcing our experimental model of fieldbuilding, the RIFS Cycle, and our focus on greenhouse gas removal (GHGR) as our second program area. Highlights in this blog include:
- We will open our second round of Garden Grants in early 2025 to support new, big-if-true ideas at the intersection of GHGR and biotechnology. Keep an eye on our LinkedIn and newsletter for the latest updates.
- We have a protocol for streamlined co-creation of problem statements to grow our Problem Statement Repository, and we want to collaborate with experts working across biotech and GHGR to highlight the field’s most pressing problems. If that sounds like you, please reach out at hello@homeworld.bio — we’d love to hear your ideas and amplify your voice.
- Within biotech and GHGR, we’re giving extra focus to bio-enhanced rock weathering and biological methane removal, which are two areas where we see the most need relative to potential.
The Roadmap–Ignite–Fund–Synthesize Cycle for scientific progress
We identified core actions that we’ve seen galvanize a community of practice: roadmapping ideas, igniting social groups, funding novel efforts, and synthesizing experience for all to learn from. The more we reflected on our experience, the more we realized that these actions — Roadmap-Ignite-Fund-Synthesize — describe a cycle for fieldbuilding.
Why bother with building a cycle? Because we need more than linear progress. Meeting frontier climate goals like gigaton-scale (Gt-scale) carbon removal requires exponential growth, and exponential growth requires feedback. In startups, exponential growth is often thought of as a virtuous cycle between two reinforcing efforts: the classific example from the 2000s is that more buyers in the eBay marketplace more sellers in the eBay marketplace. Similarly, the core of the RIFS Cycle is the hypothesis that surfacing important problems is mutually reinforcing to funding solutions.
Here is what Homeworld does in each step of the RIFS Cycle:
- Roadmap (problems discovered): First, we identify potential leverage points within a program area by interviewing subject matter experts. Within the broader topic, we identify focus areas for targeted fieldbuilding efforts. Then, we collaborate with experts to articulate actionable and specific problem statements at the frontier to share through our Problem Statement Repository.
- Ignite (community engaged): By sharing problem statements, curating workshops, and publishing podcast episodes interviewing experts, we engage the biotech practitioner community on our identified focus areas. The key goals of Ignite are to broaden discourse around the focus areas, produce more problem statements, and connect practitioners to actionable problems.
- Fund (teams activated): Our Garden Grants funding program supports lab-sized teams to de-risk early-stage ideas within our broader program area. Last year, we funded 16 teams to work on protein engineering for climate solutions. In early 2025, we’ll open a funding opportunity at the intersection of GHGR and biotechnology.
- Synthesize (community integrated): We bring the knowledge and experience gained through new research back into the public sphere, making learnings transparent and accessible and pointing to the next actionable steps.
After the synthesis stage, we are back to roadmapping. Ideally, the landscape has changed and the impactful leverage points have shifted. Now there is enough evidence and community to warrant more attention from funders and doers toward the next frontier.
Homeworld’s first informal cycle was on Protein Engineering in 2023, with the synthesis stage expected in Q1 2025. We will soon see if we succeeded in driving more energy into a flywheel of protein engineering toward climate goals. In 2024, while we conclude the first cycle on Protein Engineering, we began a new RIFS cycle in the application area of greenhouse gas removal.
What is greenhouse gas removal, and where are we today?
Achieving climate goals is predicted to require both culling emissions and deploying methods for greenhouse gas removal (GHGR). Specifically, it’s projected that we’ll need to remove up to 10 billion metric tons (10 Gt) of CO2 from the atmosphere per year by 2050, and up to 20 Gt of CO2 per year by 2100. Removal of other greenhouses may also be needed. In particular, methane removal may be necessary to combat increasing anthropogenic and natural emissions.
GHGR remains a new frontier full of challenges across community, knowledge, and research. While carbon dioxide removal has recently undergone substantial progress, current technologies tend to be costly and energy-intensive — especially those that are durable, i.e., stably store carbon over long timescales. Technologies for removing greenhouse gases other than CO2, such as methane, are truly nascent.
We see huge potential for biotech to impact GHGR. There’s been substantial progress on biological carbon dioxide removal technologies based on ecosystem biomass, soil, and cultivated biomass. But the role of biology is largely undeveloped for other high-durability carbon dioxide removal technologies, which are badly needed. While there is substantial potential, progress is limited by gaps across the key elements of a productive field: community, knowledge about open problems, and research. We are therefore focusing our first formal RIFS Cycle on biotech in GHGR.
In the Roadmapping phase of the RIFS Cycle on GHGR, we sought to understand the opportunities. We read reports (including the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine’s Negative Emissions Report and Spark Climate Solutions’ Atmospheric Methane Removal Primer) and spoke with sector experts to identify big-if-true, underresearched focus areas that are currently most limited across the elements of a productive field.
Ignite for GHGR: a focus on bio-enhanced rock weathering and biological methane removal
Over the next 4 months, Homeworld will launch a series of events and opportunities geared toward GHGR, with a special focus on bio-enhanced rock weathering (bio-ERW) and methane removal.
Enhanced rock weathering (ERW) is a leading CDR method that accelerates the natural dissolution (weathering) of alkaline minerals. Weathering naturally draws down ~0.3 billion metric tons of CO2 per year by releasing alkalinity that converts CO2 into dissolved or solid carbonates. In the leading ERW method, finely ground minerals are spread on soils that have abiotic conditions that favor dissolution. Bio-enhanced rock weathering (bio-ERW) may further increase mineral dissolution rate by several fold by leveraging mechanisms that microbes, fungi, and plants use to extract nutrients from minerals. Bio-ERW is mostly at the concept phase, with the possibility of Gt-scale bio-ERW in soils or reactors being posited in a few papers (e.g., here, here), and explored experimentally by only a couple (here, here).
Key open problems for bio-ERW include design and techno-economic analysis of possible implementations, as well as systematic characterization of the mechanisms underlying biocatalyzed mineral dissolution.
Methane, which is more potent than CO2 but released in smaller amounts, is the second-most important greenhouse gas and has caused ~30% of warming thus far. Owing to natural oxidation of methane to CO2 in the atmosphere, methane emissions are especially harmful in the short-term, causing >80-fold the warming impact of CO2 on a 20-year timescale and ~30-fold after 100 years. There is already >2.5-fold more methane in the atmosphere compared to pre-industrial times, and emissions from natural sources are anticipated to dramatically increase from as a feedback to climate change.
Methane removal (MR) seeks to remove methane from the atmosphere by oxidizing it to CO2. MR is a truly nascent field, with only a few conceptual papers published so far (see Spark’s Primer). Spark Climate Solutions recently issued some of the first grants in MR, so new research is coming. Biological methane removal (bio-MR) is proposed as a way to oxidize atmospheric methane by leveraging methanotrophic (methane-eating) bacteria in reactors, or by enhancing natural methanotrophy in soils or forests.
Key open problems in bio-MR include design and techno-economic analysis of methane bioreactors and development of tools for studying and manipulating methane monooxygenase, the key enzyme in methanotrophy.
We’re excited to amplify the voices of leaders and connect researchers across relevant disciplines in the areas of bio-ERW and bio-MR, as well as in biotech and GHGR more broadly.
During Ignite for GHGR, Homeworld seeks to:
- Collaborate with subject matter experts to amplify their voices and publicly articulate scientifically-vetted, actionable problem statements at the frontier of GHGR.
- Connect practitioners with important problems they can work on in GHGR.
- Catalyze new relationships across disciplines that can together address problems in new GHGR fields from all necessary perspectives.
Experiments to Ignite Community for Bio-ERW and Methane Removal
Since this is our first formal Ignite phase, we are thinking out loud about our upcoming efforts. We’ve identified a set of experiments we hope will foster community and create catalytic literature around actionable problems intersecting biotech and GHGR.
Experiment 1: Cultivate a Problem Statement Repository to highlight actionable problems at the frontiers
We’ve built a Problem Statement Repository that highlights important problems at emerging frontiers of climate biotech. Problem statements are designed to concisely articulate well-motivated, specific, actionable goals toward frontier challenges that are addressable by lab-sized teams.
Experiment 2: Co-create problem statements via expert interviews and workshops
We need to consult the experts to understand where the bottlenecks at the cutting edge really are. We’ve already spoken with many leaders in academia and industry and studied the literature to learn about the GHGR field broadly, and we’ve collaboratively created a few problem statements on bio-ERW and bio-MR along the way (example). During Ignite, we’ll conduct 1-on-1 interviews and small-group workshops with experts using a structure that is designed to co-create problem statements.
Experiment 3: Highlight expertise in GHGR on The Climate Biotech Podcast
We soft-launched The Climate Biotech Podcast a few months ago, and we’ll continue interviewing brilliant practitioners in GHGR and related fields in future episodes. Follow along on Spotify or Apple Podcasts, and check out some episodes on bio-MR with Lisa Stein and Vince Gauci (link coming soon!) that we’ve already released.
Upcoming funding opportunities, events, and more
We did the analysis and talked with the community and it all comes out that there is very little funding for the ambitious efforts. Deploying biotech to climate challenges […] is hard in both science and business. Very few funders have the knowledge or appetite to bet on the first experiment. If we can’t take the first swing for big ideas, how can we possibly expect to make the 1000x technological improvements the IPCC, COP, NASEM and others all say we need?
“What we learned doing Garden Grants,” a 3000-word analysis of four experiments and 10 takeaways from Homeworld Collective’s inaugural funding program.
The translational intersection of climate and biotech is underfunded relative to its potential, especially for new, big-if-true ideas. We believe we must create more available funding for ambitious projects in climate biotech, so we designed our Garden Grants funding program to fill a crucial gap in research funding from government and venture capital — sources traditionally too risk-averse to accelerate the most novel tech advancements at the speed the climate crisis requires.
Our inaugural Garden Grants program in 2023 created a funding space for scientists to de-risk early-stage frontier research intersecting protein engineering and climate tech. Grantees pitched their big ideas in public, received transparent and non-anonymized reviews of their work, and built community with fellow practitioners while developing solutions.
…Only $107M from the NSF has gone to protein engineering within climate-relevant contexts since 2009. Although the Department of Energy (DoE) has a more applied mandate, fewer than 1% of its engineering-focused publications mention proteins.
“Who are the government funders of climate biotech?,” a report in which we analyzed 350,000 grants and papers
In early 2025, we’ll enter our Fund phase in GHGR and open our second round of Garden Grants. Here are reminders of how you can stay up-to-date and get involved:
- Are you currently working on applications of biotech in GHGR? Feel free to reach out to hello@homeworld.bio with a summary of your ideas — we’d love to hear about it and help you find potential future collaborators.
- Interested in learning more about existing work on where biotech and GHGR intersect? Listen to our interviews with Lisa Stein and Vince Gauci on The Climate Biotech Podcast, and keep an eye out for new episodes.
- Check out our LinkedIn page for the latest updates on Garden Grants. We’ll announce official launch dates and submission deadlines soon. We’ll also host public workshops for writing effective, well-researched problem statements, with a special focus on GHGR.
- For the latest information across the climate biotech ecosystem, including funding opportunities, research, events, and more, sign up for our newsletter, The Homeworld Confluence.
Thank you to our funders
We are grateful to the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, the Grantham Foundation, and Schmidt Futures for supporting Homeworld Collective’s mission to grow the field of climate biotech. Additionally, we’re proud to announce new support of $1.5M from Quadrature Climate Foundation to drive forward our RIFS Cycles in GHGR and launch a new RIFS Cycle in geobiotechnology.