Backed by $3.5M of support from leading science philanthropists, Homeworld Collective provides community, guidance, and funding for climate biotechnologists unwavering in their pursuit of planetary health
BOSTON, Sept. 21, 2023 /PRNewswire-PRWeb/ -- Homeworld Collective, the 501(c)(3) nonprofit igniting the growth of climate biotechnology, today introduced their nonprofit as the go-to source for scientists, technologists, entrepreneurs, and funders committed to maximizing the impact of climate biotechnology for planetary health. The launch also coincides with the announcement of their grantmaking system for building the field of climate biotech, Homeworld Garden Grants. In its first cycle, Homeworld Collective will deploy $1M in funding for climate biotech. The organization's goal is to foster a cohesive community across academia, industry, and funders in climate biotech that is organized around clear pathways to impact and develop viable solutions for problems plaguing our planet.
Homeworld Collective is backed by leading science philanthropies including Schmidt Futures and the Grantham Foundation for the Protection of the Environment. Having successfully raised $3.5 million, the funding will be used to create crucial community resources from knowledge roadmaps to datasets, actively connect practitioners in emerging problem spaces, and provide grants for the novel climate biotech research that the growing community produces.
Daniel Goodwin, Ph.D., and Paul Reginato, Ph.D., founders of Homeworld Collective, began building their global community in 2019 after recognizing the dire lack of community, resources, funding, and education in the field of climate biotechnology. Having started as an informal community, Homeworld Collective was officially established as a nonprofit in 2022.
"We are empowering an attitude of action-oriented climate optimism," said Paul Reginato, Founding Co-Director of Homeworld Collective. "There are countless biotechnologists worldwide looking to apply their talents to building a sustainable way of life and protecting our planet. However, many of these brilliant and driven individuals struggle with a lack of clear pathways to impact and people to work with. The revolution in biotechnology we've seen over the last few decades was driven by medicine, and, as a result, there is a very well-established community around medical biotech that provides plenty of opportunities to biotechnologists looking to make a difference in human health. In contrast, climate biotechnology currently lacks the social infrastructure and problem maps that can enable people to connect to impactful work. We're eager to extend our support to this motivated community and continue building pathways to meaningful and impactful work in climate biotechnology."
To support its vision of building a vibrant community of practice in climate biotech, Homeworld Collective's Garden Grants program will launch with a novel grantmaking framework that strengthens the community around high-impact problems while providing $1M for research funding through Fast-Grants-style grantmaking. The first round of grantmaking is scoped on climate solutions that utilize protein engineering. That scoping choice was motivated by a thesis that protein engineering, a high-growth branch of biotechnology (e.g., AlphaFold), has an outsize potential for climate impact but is underfunded. While protein engineering has the potential for impact in sustainability applications ranging from biomanufacturing to agriculture to mining, it falls into a climate tech funding gap: protein engineering efforts for sustainability are too application-focused to be funded as fundamental research, yet too risky to be funded as applied research or backed by private capital. Homeworld's analysis of 177,962 National Science Foundation (NSF) grants and 188,487 Department of Energy (DoE)-funded publications showed that only 0.1% of NSF funding since 2009 and 1% of DoE-backed publications were for protein engineering in the context of climate. Beyond fast funding, Homeworld will provide a cohort and mentorship program for the applicants it funds and will educate the broader community by publicly sharing high-quality problem statements derived from the projects it funds. Through combined funding, community building, and education, Homeworld's goal is for the Garden Grants program to direct the rapid growth of protein engineering technology toward sustainability.
"At this point, we've met with over 500 practitioners across the climate biotech ecosystem," said Daniel Goodwin, Founding Co-Director of Homeworld Collective. "Creating funding resources — like our Garden Grants program — is critical, but not sufficient to support a thriving community in climate biotech. We need to go beyond financial resources and think about what makes a community productive, and make tools that improve the productivity of an entire field by supporting the needs of practitioners as fully as possible."
One such tool that Homeworld Collective is focusing on is technology roadmap development and the work that it facilitates — the roadmaps identify the most promising and impactful research pathways in emerging areas of climate biotech. Homeworld Collective then connects biotechnologists with engineers in disparate disciplines who together have the requisite expertise to address the novel research challenges identified by the roadmaps. Once these problem-specific sub-communities are formed, Homeworld advocates for funding, whether to third parties or by creating new types of grants in the Garden Grants program. The result is a virtuous cycle where knowledge creation, community building, and funding come together for maximum impact. Homeworld Collective recently released Part 1 of its three-part Roadmap for Biotechnology in Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR), an emerging interdisciplinary technology space that is anticipated to become one of the world's largest industries by midcentury. As part of the roadmap, the organization identified a set of 13 actionable problems researchers can begin working on today in the field that the IPCC says will be a critical component of the transition to a decarbonized society.
The climate technology market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 24% through 2033 to a total market size of $183 billion. Climate biotechnology is a rapidly developing sub-field that leverages the power of cutting-edge biotechnology to develop a broad set of solutions to climate change, yet it is a field that is underdefined and under-resourced. In establishing Homeworld Collective, climate solutions — including sustainable manufacturing, efficient mining of critical minerals for the energy transition, the improvement of crop productivity and climate resistance, and the conservation and restoration of ecosystems — will be prioritized, funded, developed, and deployed at an accelerated pace, simultaneously elevating the field of climate biotechnology and the individuals innovating within it simultaneously.
"The urgency of addressing climate change cannot be overstated, and it demands innovative solutions from all sectors. Climate biotechnology in particular has a wealth of technological potential that is currently undertapped. As a nascent field, now is the time to support new approaches that can create new learning curves. We at Schmidt Futures see enormous value in supporting the community of Homeworld Collective — not only are they empowering climate biotechnologists today, but they are planting the seeds for the revolutionary ideas and technologies that will positively impact generations to come." Said Pat McGrath, Senior Fellow at Schmidt Futures.
Homeworld Collective recently announced the launch of the Homeworld Ideas Writing Challenge. The competition seeks submissions —from both technical experts and novices alike — that envision a future where biology is used as a tool to realize a more sustainable world. The grand prize winner will be awarded $10,000. Interested parties should review the full prompt and submit their essay by October 1, 2023 at 11:59 pm EST.
Scientists, technologists, entrepreneurs, and funders committed to combating climate change and looking to join a growing community, please visit: https://homeworld.bio/
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SOURCE Homeworld Collective
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