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At Connecting Genetics to Climate, we’re constantly exploring strategies for creating engagement around climate biotechnologies. During our February 2025 webinar, we led an interactive discussion of different approaches and themes that our community has used in engaging with myriad audiences about the promises and challenges of biotech with climate applications.
To continue this discussion in greater depth, on May 19, 2025, we hosted “Climate Biotechnology Engagement: Part II“, a webinar discussion of past and present biotech engagement strategies, while imagining new futures.
We were joined by Christina Agapakis, co-founder of Oscillator, who examined approaches to biotechnology storytelling and shared her perspectives on engagement for climate biotechnology. We also explored impacts of past strategies and beliefs about engagement, and what can be done to improve our collective efforts going forward.
Pre-event resources from Connecting Genetics to Climate
- “The thought-terminating cliches of public engagement in science” article by Christina Agapakis
- “The Spirit of Asilomar and the Future of Biotechnology” meeting (report-outs anticipated in the coming month)
- “What is public engagement?” a resource from the UK-based National Coordinating Centre for Public Engagement
- “What does equitable co-production entail” article in Community Science by K.L. Akerlof and colleagues
The Connecting Genetics to Climate team considers science communication, outreach, and public engagement to be overlapping yet distinct approaches. Public engagement particularly emphasizes listening, multi-way dialogue, and co-production. For a primer on the essentials of public engagement see our Part I webinar from Feb 2025.
Resources shared during event
From Christina Agapakis:
- Work from Emma Frow‘s research group, including “A bumpy road ahead for biocontainment” Nature Communications article and related talk “Rethinking Containment: Deliberately Released Genetically Engineered Organisms“
- Zbiotics probiotic products
- Biomason bio-based cement
From participants:
- Planted Materials develops plant-based building materials
- Jellatech produces bio-identical complex proteins for a range of industries using advanced cellular agriculture and synthetic biology
- Juniper VC is a bioindustrial focused funder
- Hoofprint Biome is developing a cow burp methane reduction technology
