The Climate Promise of Enhanced Photosynthetic Trees
Ever since the Industrial Revolution, humans have been spewing dangerous amounts of carbon into the atmosphere.
In Episode 98 of the Business for Good podcast, Living Carbon co-founder and CEO Maddie Hall talked about how faster-growing trees can capture more atmospheric carbon and help address the effects of climate change.
Based in San Francisco, Living Carbon works to improve trees’ ability to photosynthesize, enabling them to speed up their growth cycle and capture carbon more efficiently.
Speeding up nature
After starting in 2019 with $5 million in initial capital, plus a $500,000 Department of Energy grant, Living Carbon has raised about $15 million, allowing it to bioengineer two tree species for more rapid photosynthesis, and thus, growth. Another part of its development efforts centers on bioengineering trees for drought resistance.
In March 2022, Living Carbon published its first white paper and has definitively moved toward the commercialization stage.
If you think about it, trees at their core are just big columns of carbon. Cut one down, and you put the stored carbon from the tree and the soil beneath it right back into the atmosphere. Planting new trees is helpful, but they take a long time to recapture all that carbon — and time is something we don’t have much of. According to the United Nations, we only have about a decade left for any mitigation efforts to prevent catastrophic climate change.
As CNN noted in its 2022 coverage of Living Carbon’s work, one big problem with fighting catastrophic climate change is that immeasurable damage has already been done. Regardless of how quickly we turn off the coal-belching plants and switch to renewables, two centuries’ worth of atmospheric carbon isn’t going anywhere without a lot of help.
Trees are one solution. Over their lifespan, trees continually absorb carbon dioxide as they undergo photosynthesis. The impediment is that many species of trees grow no more than a foot a year.
Maddie and her team at Living Carbon are tackling the core issue by bioengineering trees to grow better and more efficiently from the beginning. Like other companies innovating in this space, Living Carbon is making part of its profits based on the carbon credits this work can produce.
Living Carbon’s specimens have bulked up so quickly that they consist of up to 53 percent more biomass than other members of their species of the same age. This means they could reach maturity faster. Living Carbon has already conducted trial plantings on abandoned mining sites. Its goal is to plant anywhere from 4 to 5 million of its bio-enhanced trees by the close of 2023.
Seeds of the future
Just before establishing Living Carbon, Maddie worked with OpenAI as a special projects coordinator. With a background in operations analysis, project management, and seed-stage VC, she did a fair amount of thinking about the future from a big-picture standpoint.
Maddie points out that one of the central issues with making large-scale reforestation work is the time needed to accomplish the goal versus the need for short-term cash flow. As a result, techniques for faster growth are all the more important.
Living Carbon believes its trees will have a higher growth and survival rate over the long term since it’s focused on planting in degraded lands, along with thorough site preparation and gene-editing and genetic engineering technologies.
One advantage of Living Carbon’s approach is that its techniques don’t have to undergo lengthy USDA approval processes. That’s because it isn’t engineering for pesticide resistance or any other attribute regulated by the agency.
Living Carbon cultivates a variety of revenue streams from its work. This involves the aforementioned carbon credits, but it also includes the sale of seedlings. Collaborating with landowners, the company handles all the site prep work and planting, making the seedlings available at cost. Living Carbon then returns a part of its carbon credits to its partner landowners. Another advantage the company offers its partners is the free turnaround of largely unusable and unprofitable land.
Living Carbon doesn’t do plantings itself. Instead, it takes its best-performing seedlings to commercial nursery partners for propagation. Experts hired for their knowledge of regional ecosystems will do the actual planting. Meanwhile, Living Carbon will use the container-planting technique, superior to the use of drones, to grow the millions of plantings it’s after.
While it’s only doing enhanced photosynthesis techniques on a couple of species right now, the Living Carbon team currently has about 17,000 species cell lines it could use in the future.
How “natural” is natural anyway?
The podcast conversation with Maddie touched on issues of “natural” versus “human-made.” Is it better in the long run to genetically engineer trees to combat climate change? From a practical standpoint, the answer is yes. Given the urgency of this pivot point in human history, a technology that can help mitigate large-scale habitat damage while populating the world with beautiful new trees is a big win.
Maddie pointed out that some people can look at AI or bioengineering and find it “scary,” but she’s working to change that narrative. As one of the relatively few people working at the intersection of climate and tech — and immersed in it since her high school days — she wants to refocus attention on how technology can make things better. To critics of her enhanced techniques, Maddie noted that the effect humans have had on the environment in the past 200 years is anything but natural.
Enhancing photosynthesis is, furthermore, very different from engineering for pesticide resistance, where the results can decimate other plants in a region. Living Carbon is planting in areas where their trees are native. These are also areas where, unlike in the case of the endangered Amazon, there is a current dearth of biodiversity.
So, instead of a “blanket nebulous concern” about potentially harmful technological processes, Maddie asks that we look at the real purpose and scientific work behind any innovation.
So go check out the conversation, and get ready to be inspired!
