Of the great challenges facing humanity, climate change may be the most urgently felt — visible in rising seas, intensifying wildfires, and the accelerating loss of glaciers and ice sheets. Unlike the threat of nuclear weapons, climate change offers something rare: the possibility that human ingenuity, applied with sufficient commitment, can help reverse it.
Progress on climate change mitigation has been real. Between 2005 and 2023, US GDP grew roughly 45% while energy-related CO₂ emissions declined by about 20%. But renewables alone cannot solve the problem. Even if all carbon emissions were brought to zero over the next few decades, greenhouse gases already in the atmosphere will almost certainly drive average global temperatures above the critical 2°C threshold. The world urgently needs strategies for active carbon drawdown. Climate adaptation — strengthening agriculture, coastlines, and ecosystems against changes already underway — must proceed alongside mitigation.
Trees are the largest photosynthetic machines in the biosphere. Charles DeLisi and colleagues have explored engineering trees to produce wood strong enough to substitute for steel and concrete in construction — a double win in which managed forest plantations draw down atmospheric carbon while simultaneously displacing cement and steel production, industries that together emit billions of tons of CO₂ annually.
Land plants cover roughly 120 gigatons of atmospheric carbon each year through photosynthesis. Much of it returns to the atmosphere through respiration. Even a modest reduction in that return — through better land management amplified by agricultural genomics — could significantly slow the buildup of atmospheric CO₂. Crops engineered with deeper root architectures deposit more carbon below ground. Crops that fix atmospheric nitrogen reduce reliance on synthetic fertilizers, themselves a major source of greenhouse gas emissions. DeLisi has argued that a commitment to agrogenomics — analogous in ambition to the Human Genome Project — could deliver benefits surpassing even those of the HGP.
Microbial genomics adds another dimension. Soil microbes govern how much organic carbon is retained in the ground versus returned to the atmosphere. Northern permafrost regions contain an estimated 1,500 gigatons of carbon; as warming accelerates thaw, microbial activity releases this stored carbon as CO₂ and methane, creating a dangerous feedback loop that microbial genomics may help monitor and address.
At the heart of all biological carbon capture lies photosynthesis. The central carbon-fixing reactions occur in the Calvin-Benson cycle. The key enzyme, RuBisCO, is remarkably inefficient — losing up to 20–30% of potential photosynthetic efficiency in most crops by reacting with oxygen rather than CO₂. Engineering RuBisCO for greater speed and specificity would be a double win: more atmospheric carbon captured, and higher crop yields per growing cycle.
The application of genomics to climate raises profound questions of genetic ethics — about who controls engineered crops, how benefits and risks are distributed across nations, and how we govern technologies released into ecosystems. These are not reasons to halt progress but to pursue it thoughtfully. Charles DeLisi brings to these questions the perspective of someone who helped build modern genomics through the Human Genome Project — and who remains convinced that the hardest problems facing humanity are not beyond our reach, as long as we are committed to solving them.
Charles De Lisi, PhD.
Metcalf Professor of Science and Engineering
Boston University
College of Engineering
Boston, MA
