Harnessing Plants Initiative

The Harnessing Plants Initiative (HPI) is developing plants that better capture and store carbon and adapt to diverse climate conditions.

These Salk Ideal Plants will remove CO₂ from the atmosphere, convert it into a stable form of carbon, called suberin, and bury it in the ground for decades. Salk Ideal Plants could reduce excess CO₂ in the atmosphere by 20% to 46% each year.

In addition to focusing on crop plants, which can be readily scaled up within the existing agriculture infrastructure, HPI is developing plants that advance coastal and wetlands restoration and sequester even more CO₂.

Climate change poses an immediate existential threat to the planet. We face widespread famine, water shortages, rising oceans, epidemics, increasingly frequent and violent mega-storms, habitat destruction and species loss.

The world is already spending billions of dollars on episodic relief and, if temperatures keep rising, will spend trillions more. Time is running out – the United Nations predicts that, by 2030, rising global temperatures will have progressed beyond our control. We must act now.

Salk was created to solve major problems and global climate change is one of the biggest. With our world-class plant biology team, deep knowledge in genomics and other disciplines and state-of-the art facilities, the Institute is uniquely positioned to address this emergency.

Plants convert CO₂ into sugars, polymers, cellulose and other materials. When these break down, for example after a growing season, much of this stored carbon is released back into the atmosphere. However, other carbon-storing plant materials, such as suberin, do not degrade as rapidly, keeping carbon in the soil.

By developing plants with deeper, more massive roots and higher suberin content, Salk scientists will enhance these carbon-storing mechanisms to help restore a healthy climate balance.

By studying model plants, such as Lotus japonicus and Arabidopsis thaliana, the team is identifying genes that can help them store more carbon. From there, they will transfer these genetic traits to six food crops – corn, soybean, rice, wheat, cotton/cottonseed, and rapeseed/canola – and distribute them to farmer around the globe.

In an interrelated track, Salk scientists will also instill new traits in wetland plants, helping them survive in many different environments while storing more CO₂.

One of HPI’s fundamental goals is producing plants that will equal, if not exceed, the yields of current crops. Also, larger root systems, rich in suberin, help plants fix more carbon in soils, making them more fertile. With their newfound ability to store large amounts of carbon, farmers could potentially sell carbon credits, creating an additional income source.

HPI is developing plants that will be more resilient: enhancing their ability to hold water, resist pathogens and tolerate stress. Salk Ideal Plants could also help control erosion and reduce the need for chemical fertilizers.

Salk scientists are already making progress in the lab, illuminating the biological mechanisms that drive root depth, mass and suberin content. This fundamental discovery phase should take around five years. From there, Salk and partners will work with governments and the agricultural industry to transfer these carbon-storing traits to crop and wetland plants. Once that component is complete, HPI will begin distributing these new climate-saving plants around the world.

HPI plans to scale up worldwide distribution by 2030, with significant carbon reductions by 2035.

We all know the climate is in crisis. If we do nothing, that crisis will soon become a catastrophe. Plants have evolved into the perfect carbon capture and storage vehicle, offering a readymade solution. While HPI researchers must build on existing technologies to develop Salk Ideal Plants, they don’t need to start from scratch. In addition to leveraging plants’ existing superpowers, HPI is scalable because farming is everywhere.

Several private funding groups affiliated with The Audacious Project have donated more than $35 million to support HPI. In addition, the Hess Corporation has given $12.5 million and Howard H. and Maryam R. Newman have made an initial $2 million gift.

Time is short, and we will relentlessly build on this base. We hope that you will join our efforts to reduce CO₂ in the atmosphere and save the planet.