Since 2019, we’ve met hundreds of fellow bioengineers on the same journey as us. We are motivated to build a way of life that supports sustained thriving of human society and all of our non-human kin. We care deeply about protecting our home from the harms of climate change and environmental destruction. We know that major technological hurdles stand between us and sustainability. And as skilled engineers, we want to bring our minds, hands, and hearts to the challenge in full force.
A wellspring of top biotech talent is actively seeking work in climate, but needs help. They require collaborators, knowledge of the problem-space, and funding to de-risk scientific ideas and career transitions. In short, climate biotech needs more community infrastructure, and that is why we created the 501(c)(3) non-profit Homeworld Collective.
It’s a big world out there.
Transitioning to sustainable industry means swiftly changing the life cycle of nearly every atom that humanity moves. That means billion-ton challenges with short timelines for innovation. As engineers, viewing the sustainability of a thriving biosphere through the lens of technology development feels like an empowering call to action. And yet, many of us have found it difficult to connect to clear problems, dig in, and innovate. We are constantly hearing talented biotech professionals saying “I want to work on something with climate impact, but I don’t know where to start and I don’t know who to talk to.” It is non-trivial to navigate through those large challenge areas (eg, gigaton CDR capture capacity by 2030) to find one’s fit with a high-impact actionable project.
Perhaps even more challenging: not every solution will fit inside existing industries and research communities. Technical fields form as communities coalesce and solidify around common problems, and our collective response to the emerging technology challenges of climate change is in its early stages.
Climate biotech is a new field of study and practice dedicated to applying the principles of biotechnology to the contemporary challenge of sweeping deep decarbonization. Practitioners have worked to provide food, develop goods and protect ecosystems as long as biology has been studied: what’s new is the diversity and scale of emerging problems, and integration of biotechnology with the broader efforts of the rapidly-growing climate tech movement.
We work with a community-first approach.
Through first-hand experience and our experiences with the still-nascent community, we have identified needs that must be met in order to advance climate biotech beyond its present ideas-limited regime and accelerate it toward community-scale hyperproductivity. Meeting those needs is the foundation of Homeworld Collective’s mission:
- Community: A growing number of people want to work in climate biotech, but are hindered by a lack of collaborators and clear direction.
- Knowledge: 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.
- Action: 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.
What will Homeworld do toward solutions? We’ll explain more in the weeks ahead, but here are a few seeds:
- We will foster community in climate biotech across researchers, entrepreneurs and stakeholders. Through collaborative projects, workshops, events, field trips and discourse, we support growth of relationships, formation of teams, and generation of community knowledge.
- We will publish and fund roadmaps, gap analyses and perspectives that guide the field. We will leverage crowdsourcing and open review to enable synthesis of knowledge and diligencing of ideas across traditional boundaries. Our first efforts include deep dives on carbon dioxide removal and opportunities for protein engineering in climate tech.
- After surveying the funding opportunities for early stage climate tech, Homeworld is developing a radically open granting program in the style of Fast Grants. Success of our program will look like generation of community knowledge while refining and enabling actionable projects.
We welcome you to join and participate.
One of the best feelings in life is having great ideas and the ability to act on them. This is true for individuals, and this is true for communities. Even more, empowerment feeds a virtuous cycle: the better we become at acting on our current ideas, the more we uncover new ideas, which inspires more action. It’s just like climbing to the top of one hill only to see a beckoning skyline of mountains ahead. Let’s climb them together. This world is our home.
Paul Reginato, Founding Co-Director
Daniel Goodwin, Founding Co-Director
Tony Kulesa, Founding Board Member
Josh Moser, Founding Board Member
Judy Savitskaya, Founding Board Member
Sarah Sclarsic, Founding Board Member