Last fall, we announced our program focused on greenhouse gas removal (GHGR), with the hypothesis that surfacing important problems is mutually reinforcing to funding solutions. Today, we’re announcing the 11 teams selected for our GHGR Garden Grants—the culmination of our first Roadmap-Ignite-Fund-Syntheise (RIFS) cycle and a test of whether our fieldbuilding approach can systematically accelerate breakthrough research.
The results exceeded our most optimistic expectations and validated our core thesis: when you create the right conditions for collaborative problem identification, the research community responds with remarkable energy and innovation.
From Hypothesis to Results: Testing the RIFS Cycle
In our Fall 2024 preview, we outlined our belief that meeting frontier climate goals requires exponential growth, and exponential growth requires feedback loops. Our RIFS Cycle was designed to create those loops: roadmapping problems, igniting community engagement, funding novel research, and synthesizing learnings back into the field.
The hypothesis was simple but untested: surfacing important problems would be mutually reinforcing to funding solutions, creating a virtuous cycle similar to how more buyers attract more sellers in a marketplace.
Our focus areas within GHGR were bio-enhanced rock weathering and biological methane removal, which were chosen because they represented big-if-true opportunities that were “mostly at the concept phase” and “truly nascent” respectively. We saw potential for biology to make Gt-scale impact in those areas, but each area needed support in the three foundational elements we’d identified: knowledge of open problems, research to move frontiers forward, and community to connect them.
The Ignite Phase: From Concept to Community
During our Ignite phase, we executed the experiments we outlined in our fall preview.
We started by conducting expert interviews and workshops designed to co-create problem statements, collaborated with subject matter experts to amplify their voices, and highlighted GHGR expertise on The Climate Biotech Podcast (Lisa Stein, Vince Gauci, Sam Abernethy).
The breakthrough moment came with our November 2024 Workshop on Biological Methane Removal, co-hosted with Spark Climate Solutions and timed strategically after NASEM’s report on atmospheric methane removal. We were honored to host 35 world experts to collaboratively ideate around frontier challenges in methane removal via engineered plants, bioreactors, and methanotrophy enhancement in soils and forests. The outputs of the workshop This wasn’t just about generating problem statements—it was about proving that convening world experts around frontier challenges could create the collaborative foundation for breakthrough research.
“The quality of scientific discussion was at a level I have not yet experienced in my career and was quite stimulating.”
From the workshop, we published 10 new problem statements focused on GHGR with contributions from 14 co-author attendees. Importantly, these were not academic exercises—they became the foundation for real research proposals.
From Gap to Solution: $1.4M Deployed
Last fall, we wrote: “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.” Our GHGR Garden Grants directly addressed these gaps.
In total, our program is deploying ~$1.4 million to 11 teams. What’s most inspiring to us is the validation of another thesis of ours: mission-aligned funders in our ecosystem will choose to fund projects that Homeworld rigorously identified as worthy of funding.
We are thrilled that both Spark Climate Solutions and Grantham Foundation joined us as co-funders after our review process had completed, enabling funding of projects that were reviewed as excellent but could not be supported through Homeworld’s $1M fund alone. This collaboration represents something we’ve been working toward since our inaugural Garden Grants—helping the funding community support more great researchers with innovative ideas surfaced through our programs . We are also grateful for support from Quadrature Climate Foundation, who not only directly funded our GHGR RIFS cycle but also supported us with direct regranting funds. All of these partners together enabled us to get to the full $1.4M.
“We’re pleased to partner with Homeworld because we share a common goal: building new scientific fields to advance high-potential climate solutions. In the Spark Methane Removal Program, we’re interested in exploring methane removal research from all angles, including biological approaches. Homeworld’s GHGR Garden Grants program demonstrates how many high-quality, fundable proposals there are in biological methane removal. Spark is proud to fund one of these proposals, alongside the nine funded by Homeworld, and there are still many other promising research avenues to be explored in this area. This whole process shows that by collaborating, we can help bridge disciplines, generate new ideas, and ensure the most promising concepts find the support they need to advance,” said David Mann, Co-Founder and Head of Strategy at Spark Climate Solutions.
For any funders interested, we are still seeking support for a number of quality proposals in methane removal that deserve funding. Please contact grants@homeworldcollective.org if you would like to fund impactful, early-stage research.
We are also encouraged by the community support we’ve seen for open science. Garden Grants gives the opportunity for applicants to publicly share their problem statements while keeping their solutions private, and over 50 of our applicants chose to share their problem statements publicly. This growing willingness to share problem-focused thinking not only sparks collaboration but also helps define the frontier of climate biotech. This tells us that researchers are recognizing the collective benefit of openness in accelerating field-level progress.
The translational intersection of climate and biotech remains underfunded relative to its potential, but Homeworld is proving there’s both demand and quality research ready for support.
Meet Our 2025 GHGR Garden Grant Awardees
Each project tackles frontier challenges in greenhouse gas removal. These projects span development of new monitoring tools and biosensors to engineering biological systems for carbon removal. Together, they represent the kind of coordinated research efforts needed to move emerging technologies from concept to real-world impact. Further, we’re thrilled that 70% of these projects are solving collaboratively-identified problems shared in Homeworld’s Problem Statement Repository.
Hendrik Schaefer (University of Warwick)- Which methanotrophs drive methane degradation in the phyllosphere of trees?
Investigating which methane-eating microbes drive atmospheric methane removal on tree surfaces.
Learn more about this project →
Carol Baumbauer (Boise State University) – Low Cost Sensors for Soil Methane Uptake
Developing low-cost, printable methane sensors that accurately detect near-atmospheric methane levels in soil.
Learn more about this project →
Neil Dalvie (Harvard Medical School) – Continuous siderophore-mediated olivine weathering
Engineering biological systems to accelerate rock weathering for enhanced carbon dioxide removal. Learn more about this project →
Christopher Gisriel (University of Wisconsin – Madison) – Enhancing Carbon Sequestration By Improving Photosynthetic Efficiency
Improving plants’ natural carbon assimilation processes by engineering photosynthetic processes to use a wider spectrum of wavelengths. Learn more about this project →
Michael Konopka (United States Naval Academy)- Profiling in vivo pMMO activity and lipid order in methanotrophs using designed fluorescent biosensors
Building live-cell measurement tools to understand and optimize methane-consuming bacteria. Learn more about this project →
Hiroki Yoshida (The University of Tübingen)- Coupling of microbial carbon capture and utilization (microCCU) and direct air capture (DAC)
Coupling microbial carbon fixation with direct air capture technologies for increased efficiency. Learn more about this project →
Jane Willenbring (Stanford University) – Worms at Work: Scoping Natural Carbon Sequestration at Scale
Investigating how earthworms can enhance carbon storage in soil. Learn more about this project →
Doug Call (North Carolina State University)- Highly-sensitive, real-time enzyme methane oxidation rate measurements using an electrochemical assay
Developing electrochemical assays for highly sensitive, real-time monitoring of biological destruction of methane. Learn more about this project →
Dimitar Z. Epihov (University of Sheffield) – Lithogardens: lithoautotrophy-powered microbial communities for improved carbon capture with enhanced rock weathering
Boosting soil microbial communities that accelerate rock weathering for improved carbon capture. Learn more about this project →
Hinsby Cadillo-Quiroz (Arizona State University) – Biomapping of Tree-based Atmospheric Methane Removal (TAMR) for Technological Development
Mapping the potential for trees and their associated microbes to remove atmospheric methane at scale. Learn more about this project →
Carlos Acevedo-Rocha (Technical University of Denmark) – Compound I-based design of methane monooxygenases
Redesigning natural enzymes to break down methane for expression in plants to passively remove atmospheric methane. Learn more about this project →
Testing Fieldbuilding at Scale
These awards represent more than funding individual projects—they’re an experiment in systematic fieldbuilding to accelerate progress in emerging technology domains. In our fall preview, we wrote about needing “exponential growth” and “feedback loops” to meet climate goals.
We set out to test whether the RIFS Cycle could create those conditions, and the early results indicate it can. The feedback loop between problem identification and research funding worked: community experts helped surface frontier challenges, researchers responded with innovative approaches, and the quality of proposals was so high that we were able to partner with co-funders to support more researchers than we could fund on our own.
Next: Scaling the Model
The lesson from our GHGR experiment is encouraging: when you create the right conditions for collaborative problem identification and connect them to funding, research communities respond with remarkable energy.
We’re not just funding projects. We’re testing whether fieldbuilding can be systematized and scaled across the climate biotech domains where biology’s “infinitely scalable, atomically precise technology” could make Gt-scale impact.
With GHGR moving into the Synthesize phase, we’re applying the RIFS model to our two new program areas: Geobiotechnology and Pollution.
Thank you to our funders
We are grateful to the Quadrature Climate Foundation, Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, the Grantham Foundation, and Schmidt Futures for supporting Homeworld Collective’s mission to grow the field of climate biotech.