Garden Grants - Greenhouse Gas Removal (GHGR)

Garden Grants - Greenhouse Gas Removal

Funder: Homeworld Collective Inc

Program Status: 2025 cohort funded and announced (July 2025); next cycle status unknown as of April 2026

Geographic Scope: International (11 funded projects across multiple countries)

Focus Areas:

Biological methane removal and measurement

Bio-enhanced rock weathering

Photosynthesis efficiency improvement

Direct air capture technologies

Soil carbon sequestration

Microbial carbon capture and utilization

Tree-based atmospheric methane removal

Enzyme engineering for GHG reduction

Sub-Focus Areas Identified:

Bio-enhanced rock weathering: Early-stage, concept-phase research with Gt-scale potential

Biological methane removal: Nascent area with high impact potential

Program Innovation - RIFS Cycle:
Roadmap-Ignite-Fund-Synthesize cycle designed to create feedback loops:

Roadmap: Expert interviews and workshops to co-create problem statements

Ignite: Community engagement, subject matter expert amplification, convenings

Fund: Deployment of research grants

Synthesize: Learning synthesis back into field

Key Features:

Surfaces important problems as mutually reinforcing to funding solutions

Creates virtuous feedback loops (similar to marketplace dynamics)

70% of 2025 awardees are solving collaboratively-identified problems from Problem Statement Repository

Over 50 applicants chose to share problem statements publicly

Convened 35 world experts in November 2024 workshop on biological methane removal

Published 10 new problem statements with contributions from 14 co-author attendees

Demonstrates exponential growth potential for climate biotech

Funding Partners (2025):

Homeworld Collective (lead funder: ~$1M)

Spark Climate Solutions (co-funder)

Grantham Foundation (co-funder)

Quadrature Climate Foundation (program support)

Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (supporter)

Schmidt Futures (supporter)

Eligibility:

Early-stage research in greenhouse gas removal biotechnology

Projects addressing frontier challenges in GHGR

Can focus on development of new tools, monitoring, biosensors, or engineered biological systems

International participation welcome

What They Fund:

Monitoring tools and biosensors for methane and carbon detection

Engineering biological systems for carbon removal

Foundational research on methane-consuming bacteria and enzymes

Soil enhancement and biochar approaches

Plant microbiome engineering

Subterranean microbial processes

What They Don't Fund:
Not explicitly stated

Contact: grants@homeworld.bio

Website: https://www.homeworld.bio/grants-greenhouse-gas-removal/

2025 Funded Cohort (12 projects):
1. Hendrik Schaefer (University of Warwick) - Which methanotrophs drive methane degradation in the phyllosphere of trees?
2. Carol Baumbauer (Boise State University) - Low Cost Sensors for Soil Methane Uptake
3. Neil Dalvie (Harvard Medical School) - Continuous siderophore-mediated olivine weathering
4. Christopher Gisriel (University of Wisconsin-Madison) - Enhancing Carbon Sequestration By Improving Photosynthetic Efficiency
5. Michael Konopka (United States Naval Academy) - Profiling in vivo pMMO activity and lipid order in methanotrophs using designed fluorescent biosensors
6. Hiroki Yoshida (The University of Tübingen) - Coupling of microbial carbon capture and utilization (microCCU) and direct air capture (DAC)
7. Jane Willenbring (Stanford University) - Worms at Work: Scoping Natural Carbon Sequestration at Scale
8. Doug Call (North Carolina State University) - Highly-sensitive, real-time enzyme methane oxidation rate measurements using an electrochemical assay
9. Dimitar Z. Epihov (University of Sheffield) - Lithogardens: lithoautotrophy-powered microbial communities for improved carbon capture with enhanced rock weathering
10. Hinsby Cadillo-Quiroz (Arizona State University) - Biomapping of Tree-based Atmospheric Methane Removal (TAMR) for Technological Development
11. Carlos Acevedo-Rocha (Technical University of Denmark) - Compound I-based design of methane monooxygenases
12. Pok Man (Bob) Leung (Monash University) - Underground solutions for aboveground climate challenges: leveraging subterranean microbial processes for GHG removal