Often overlooked in conversations about climate change, biotechnology is emerging as a practical toolkit to curb warming and blunt its impacts, said panelists on the second day of Harvard Climate Action Week. Companies behind innovations like drought-resistant crops and palm-oil substitutes are now scaling their products from lab to market as DNA sequencing grows cheaper.

“We’re hoping for a future in which the world addresses climate change with all effective tools,” said Morgan Thompson of the Connecting Genetics to Climate group at Harvard Medical School, which co-hosted the September 16 panel.

Think of drought-tolerant crops, which have been widely used on American farms for over a decade. Thompson pointed to a variety of corn using a gene spliced in from another species.

“There are a lot of agritech examples that can help with heat resistance, drought resistance, and other types of pests and disease,” Thompson said. Another example is trees engineered to grow faster so that they sequester more carbon sooner, or engineered microbes added to cattle feed to alter cows’ microbiomes and reduce the methane intensity of their burps.

During the panel, organized in collaboration with Harvard Alumni for Climate and the Environment (HACE), Thompson revealed the results of an audience poll: Only half the attendees had heard of biotech’s potential role in climate solutions. “There really is a gap in what is being discussed widely and publicly,” she said.

Biotech entrepreneur Jake Wintermute, Ph.D. ’11, said the ever-increasing speed and decreasing cost of tools such as sequencing are producing “a kind of enabling layer where it’s getting faster and cheaper to build with biotechnology, and so that means we can be a lot more creative and a lot more agile in terms of the problems we solve.”

Compared with pharmaceuticals, in agriculture “maybe you can come up with a bioproduct for a few million dollars, not a few billion,” Wintermute added. Costs could come down even further in coming years, and “you can imagine a much larger ecosystem building a lot more bioproducts.”

Innovations ‘live or die on policy’

But buy-in from the public and policymakers is essential, said Garrett Dunlap, associate director of policy and international engagement at the Engineering Biology Research Consortium.

“We have amazing innovations like drought-resistant crops and microbes that can mine critical minerals from rock. But none of them can succeed on science alone. And really, they live or die on policy,” said Dunlap. His nonprofit helps identify challenges and bottlenecks in engineering biology. In addition, he said, it works on “building efforts around biosecurity and ensuring that biotechnology is done responsibly and innovation is done responsibly.”

It’s essential that “regulation can keep pace, that Congress stays interested for more than one election cycle, and that the public buys into the story.”

Even in a polarized country, Dunlap said, “what really cuts across the political spectrum are ideas like resilience and national security and economic opportunity. And that’s where I think biotechnology has a critical role to play.”