Woods Hole Climate Foundation Wins $1 Million Grant
The Climate Foundation, a Woods Hole nonprofit organization, has been awarded a $1 million XPRIZE Milestone award from Elon Musk’s Musk Foundation for a sea reforestation initiative.
The Climate Foundation, founded by executive director and Falmouth resident Brian von Herzen in 2007, has a vision of regenerating ocean life using marine permaculture technology. The organization is based in Woods Hole but also operates out of Oregon and Nevada, working with global organizations to address worldwide climate-related problems using integrated solutions. Specifically, the $1 million was awarded due to the Climate Foundation’s work in large-scale seaweed mariculture programs to develop sustainable food value chains, provide ecosystem life support and sequester carbon dioxide.
“The Climate Foundation marine permaculture innovation is focused on addressing the food security needs for the billion people who depend on the oceans for their primary sustenance,” Dr. von Herzen said. “Not only is it getting enough food for humanity in a climate-disrupted time, but also enough food for nature.”
The XPRIZE Carbon Removal Competition was launched by the Musk Foundation to incentivize the world’s greatest innovators to tackle the threat that has loomed over humanity for decades: climate change. More specifically, rebalancing the Earth’s carbon cycle.
Some $100 million is on the line with the XPRIZE competition, with 15 projects having been designated as milestone winners and awarded $1 million each in recognition of their efforts and to support continued research. Overall winners will be awarded portions of an $80 million prize purse in 2025.
There were more than 1,100 applicants experimenting with carbon solutions in varying mediums—air, rocks, land and ocean. Of the 15 milestone winners, the Climate Foundation’s Marine Permaculture SeaForestation project was one of three ocean-oriented projects. And while carbon sequestering is the name of the game for the XPRIZE competition, the Climate Foundation is looking beyond that and taking an integrated approach that will essentially solve one problem with another. By growing kelp and seaweed on a wave- and solar-powered platform that is able to be raised and lowered depending on conditions and time of day, the Climate Foundation’s double-pronged approach both removes carbon from the ocean surface and creates a viable habitat with food supply to revitalized ecosystems.
Raymond Schmitt, an Emeritus Research Scholar and physical oceanographer with the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, explained the Climate Foundation’s project. The ocean has a major capacity for absorbing carbon dioxide, he said, and is one way of looking at a solution to the problem of climate change.
“There are 50 times as much carbon dioxide in the ocean than is in the atmosphere,” Dr. Schmitt said. “If you look at the whole system, I think the ocean is the obvious place to put the carbon dioxide.”
With 70 percent of the Earth being covered by water, putting carbon dioxide into the ocean appears to have been an obvious solution in some scientists’ minds for a while. The question has been, however, how does one do that? What the Climate Foundation has been experimenting with, Dr. Schmitt said, is enhancing what is called a biological pump, which absorbs carbon dioxide out of the surface ocean through the process of photosynthesis. Through photosynthesis carbon dioxide becomes a carbohydrate, which is exactly what life in the ocean needs to survive.
“You look at pictures of the ocean and you see half of the ocean’s surface is not very productive; there’s very little life there and you say, ‘Why is that? There’s plenty of sunshine,’” Dr. Schmitt said. “Well, it turns out it’s limited by nutrients and the nutrients—nitrates and phosphates—are just a little deeper than that.”
The ocean is very stratified, with the surface being the toughest place for life to thrive. Because of stratification—which is becoming more pronounced as surface waters warm, thanks to climate change—it is difficult for nutrients at depth to reach whatever life is on the surface. The idea, Dr. Schmitt said, is to get those nutrients from the depth of the ocean to the surface and make them available to photosynthetic agents in the ocean.
“A lot of people have this idea; it’s not just the Climate Foundation, but they’ve been perhaps the most successful at making it actually work,” he said. Using seaweed and other macroalgae, the Climate Foundation has found a way of not only sequestering carbon but actually taking it much further by simultaneously creating habitats to revitalize fish populations in areas that have been previously decimated by mass fishing and climate change.
“We think that the fish habitat is what’s missing and that is the kelp forest and the seaweed forest that we can enable with marine permaculture,” Dr. von Herzen said. “So that’s how we reboot life in the oceans, one hectare of marine permaculture at a time.”
Dr. von Herzen is currently based in Australia, where he has been since the onset of the pandemic overseeing the Climate Foundation’s Philippines site, where a marine permaculture pilot site was launched in 2019. Through this, the foundation has been able to demonstrate that at-scale, deepwater irrigation can regenerate seaweed and kelp forests in both tropical and seasonally temperate waters.
“David Attenborough said the ocean is mostly empty and between you and me right now, there are a hundred million square kilometers of Pacific subtropical ocean that are mostly empty,” Dr. von Herzen said. “Almost all of it is accessible to marine permaculture as an approach to regenerate natural upwelling and regenerate life in the ocean. And that’s first and foremost what we’re doing, and the carbon is the tail wagging the dog.”
Because of the waves and the wind, Dr. von Herzen said that seaweed naturally falls off the platform. When it does, it sinks 1,000 meters a day, essentially ending up in the abyssal ocean, where it stays for thousands of years.
“That is the carbon export,” he said. “And that’s a bonus on top of the food feed and fertilizer projects products, and on top of the regeneration of fish habitat and other ecosystem services for the ocean.”
Additionally, the fallen macroalgae provide abyssal ocean creatures with the sustenance that they need to survive, essentially revitalizing not just the ocean surface but the entire system.
The Philippines project will grow by a factor of 10 this year, which Dr. von Herzen said will provide the capacity to provide poverty alleviation to disadvantaged coastal communities that depend on the oceans for not only sustenance but economic stability. A key feature of the Climate Foundation’s hectare platforms is that they have proven to be hurricane-resistant—by lowering the platform just five meters below the surface, they were able to survive a hurricane event with seaweed still intact. Three months after the hurricane, the Climate Foundation provided a quarter ton of seedlings to neighboring communities in the central Philippines, so they could revive local farms and begin growing seaweed again.
“We have this ray of light because what’s driven people from the Philippines in the past are the hurricanes; they can’t grow the seaweed,” Dr. von Herzen said. “We can’t do aquaculture if you’ve got all these hurricanes, but since we’ve discovered and really demonstrated and proven [that] we have the only hurricane-proven platform on the planet [with a] seaweed platform that’s moored. Because we’ve got a hurricane resilience solution demonstrated now, we can scale that and show that this is a way forward that we can build hurricane resilience into those seaweed communities.”
To expand the project, the Climate Foundation needs to close the remaining $1 million funding gap. About $3 million total is needed, with one-third coming from the XPRIZE award and another third pledged upon reaching the expansion milestone.
To learn more about the Climate Foundation’s marine permaculture innovation or to donate, visit www.climatefoundation.org.