Findings from Homeworld Collective’s 2026 Climate Biotech Community Survey
The state of climate biotech: what the community told us
132 community members surveyed. 63 interviewed, across more than 40 hours of recorded and transcribed conversations.
At a glance
Our four major takeaways
- 1
The community is activated and ready to go.
87% want to maintain or increase their involvement.
- 2
A funding gap.
Funding to de-risk (57%) and to build (56%) were the two highest-ranked needs, the small capital to test an idea and the larger capital to carry a proven one to scale.
- 3
A translation gap.
83% of interviewees named the economics of scaling as a central concern, and more than half (54%) pointed to missing industry connections. Researchers lack both the techno-economic intuition and the industry ties to move work from the lab toward a market.
- 4
Too few paid jobs.
Asked what would let them do more, paid positions in climate biotech were among the most-named write-ins, raised by nine respondents.
“plenty of capable people are out there ready to help solve these problems if there were a way to pay them for it.”
Section 1
Who we heard from
These responses come from Homeworld’s community and the network around it: working practitioners close to the field, not a representative sample of it. Read everything that follows as a picture of an engaged, expert community rather than the field as a whole.
Work in climate biotech (50%) or adjacent fields (34%). Only 2% are not involved.
Hold a PhD (98 of 130).
Academia and start-ups or small companies, the two engines of early-stage R&D.
Have at least 5 years of professional experience beyond their degree, and 21% have at least 16.
Bases range from n=130 to n=132 by question.
Discipline breakdown
The community is bio-dominated rather than evenly multidisciplinary. Roughly three in five trained in a core bioscience, with chemistry and chemical engineering the next largest group.
Base: n=130. Within biosciences: biochemistry and biophysics (21), microbiology and microbial ecology (17), molecular and cell biology and genetics (12), synthetic and systems biology (9), general biology and biotechnology (7), plant biology (5), and bioengineering (4).
Section 2
The community is activated and ready to go
87% of the community want to maintain or increase their involvement in climate biotech, and 53% want to do more.
Compared to today, in the future I want to be…
Base: n=132 (all respondents). The 87% counts everyone who wants more, plus those already working in or adjacent to the field who want to stay. It excludes five respondents who are interested but not yet working in climate biotech and want to remain on the sidelines.
A closer look at proximity to the work and the desire to be involved. Each row shows what people at a given level of involvement want next:
The closer someone sits to the threshold, the more they want in. Across every level, more people want to deepen their involvement than pull back. That gap between where people are and where they want to be is the demand the rest of this report is about.
Section 3
What the field is missing
We asked the community to name the resources that would most help them apply their work to planetary health, up to three each.
Base: n=132 (respondents selecting at least one). Bars are colored by need type: funding, field-building, and ecosystem and infrastructure.
Funding tops the list, which is no surprise from a survey of scientists. The community needs both the small grants that let an idea exist and the larger capital that lets a proven idea grow.
The next tier is field-building: clearer problem definition (42%), connections to industry (34%), and working groups or consortia (31%). The community is asking for both at once, capital to do the work and the field-building that helps it leave the lab.
Where academics and startups diverge
We split the resource needs by sector to see where academia and startups want the same things and where they part ways. Academia (58 respondents) and startups or small companies (50) both drive early-stage R&D. They differ most on the earliest-stage needs and land in nearly the same place on the larger ones. Academics most want small de-risk funding (71%) and rarely need lab access (10%); startups are the reverse, with 34% wanting lab access. The two converge on build-stage capital (57% and 56%) and connections to industry (about 36% each). The early de-risking need is concentrated in academia, while the need for industry connection and translation know-how is universal.
The why behind the needs
The survey gives the ranking. The interviews explain it. Four reasons recurred.
It is too difficult to move work from the lab to the world.
This was the most common gap by far. Nearly four in five interviewees (49 of 63) named the difficulty of getting work to survive outside the lab: heterogeneous real-world conditions (especially in industry), regulatory hurdles, and the distance from a bench result to industrial scale. Many also lacked the scaling intuition and industry relationships to bridge it. Closing that gap is also what unlocks capital: a result de-risked toward real conditions is far easier to fund, so translation support is itself a lever for investment.
“learning to think more like a chemical engineer about scale and techno-economics, that’s the bottleneck on getting conviction for a scalable idea.”
The funding does not fit the shape of the work.
Two gaps came up again and again: small, fast capital to find out whether an idea is real, and the much larger capital (roughly $1M to $20M) to carry a proven idea to scale. Underneath both is a structural mismatch. About one in three interviewees (20 of 63) said venture funding is the wrong shape for much of climate biotech, with timelines and return expectations built for software rather than biology.
“we need another type of investing vehicle than venture capital. The models just don’t line up with what needs to happen.”
Knowing what is worth working on.
The survey’s third-ranked need, clearer problem definition (42%), shows up in the interviews as the tension between fundamental science and translation. The community values fundamental science. What researchers said they lack is help judging which problems will matter in the real world, and whether biology is even the right tool for a given job. About a third of interviewees raised some version of this.
“starts as ‘how do I make this about biology and then pitch it?’ rather than ‘if I were going to solve this problem, what’s the right approach?’”
A community that can sustain itself.
Climate biotech is small and feels concentrated in a few coastal cities, and many practitioners work without local peers. What people value about community is concrete: it is where collaborators are found, where the tacit knowledge that papers leave out gets shared, and where researchers stay oriented toward real-world application. Asked what Homeworld does best, community was the most common answer, and the survey agreed. 36 of the 56 interviewees who answered (64%) named building community or connection, as did 71% of survey respondents who described what Homeworld is most effective at (79 of 112).
“if many people have the same idea, it’s better to put the communal brain together so they work collectively instead of pursuing the same thing in parallel. Competition and siloing is actually holding everyone back.”
Section 4
Engagement changes what scientists think is possible
A field does not grow only by adding money. It grows when people come to believe a different kind of work is possible for them. We can see that shift inside our own community.
Of 132 respondents, only 16 had not engaged with Homeworld in any way; the other 116 connected through one or more channels. We asked whether that engagement changed the kind of work they thought was possible for them to do.
Base: n=116 (members who engaged with Homeworld through at least one channel). This group both engaged and chose to answer our survey, so it likely skews favorable. Read it as strong evidence among the already-engaged rather than a claim about the whole field.
The deeper someone engages with Homeworld, the more it changes what they think is possible
We asked everyone the same question: did Homeworld change the kind of work you thought was possible? Each group represents a different depth of engagement, and the bar is the share of that group who said “yes” or “somewhat”.
Bases: 49 / 67 / 4 respondents. Figures are “yes” plus “somewhat”. The bottom row is the baseline: people who have not engaged report no change, which is what makes the 86% meaningful. Correlational, since people who pursued grants or workshops may have been predisposed to begin with.
In the interviews, we heard what drives that shift.
“I’d probably be working on something else right now, and it might be less climate-related.”
“allowed me to take things in my own directions… having someone believe in me the way Homeworld has is the reason why I keep going even when I get all of these other rejections.”
“I felt completely on my own for a very long time. Paul and Dan were the first people I met who were not scenesters. They were true believers.”
Section 5
Go deeper
The findings above are the headline. An interactive dashboard accompanies this report for anyone who wants to explore the full dataset, filter by sector, career stage, or involvement, and see how needs shift across the community. Community Interviews are still under review and will go live once the full analysis is complete.
Methods & notes
- •Instrument: Anonymous online questionnaire (Typeform), about 10 minutes. Supplemented by 63 semi-structured interviews (more than 40 hours total), conducted via Zoom and Fathom.
- •Respondents: 132 total. Partial responses are included where they answered the core questions. Bases are reported per question and range from n=95 to 132.
- •Sample character: These responses come from Homeworld’s community and adjacent network. They are not a probability sample of the global climate biotech field, and findings should be read as a picture of this community rather than the field as a whole.
- •Multi-select note: On the resource-needs question, respondents were asked to select up to three, but the cap was not enforced (averaging 3.3 selections). This does not affect the rank order.
- •Interview coding: Counts from the interviews (for example, “49 of 63 named the difficulty of getting work to survive outside the lab”) come from a structured read of all 63 transcripts against a fixed rubric, judging only the interviewee’s own statements.
Definitions we are using in this analysis:
- •Climate Biotech: Bio-based technologies that help advance climate and planetary health goals. This includes (among other things) reducing greenhouse gases, supporting cleaner environments, enabling electrification and decarbonization, and producing chemicals and materials more sustainably.
- •Industry: Established commercial sector consisting of companies and organizations that produce goods or services at commercial scale, including manufacturers, operators, suppliers, and other incumbent businesses, as distinct from early-stage startups or research organizations.
- •Measurement, Reporting, and Verification (MRV): Process of measuring emissions or environmental outcomes, reporting the data in a standardized way, and verifying the information through an independent review to ensure it is accurate, complete, and credible.