Dr. Colin Averill researches the community of fungus and bacteria living beneath the forest floor and how it affects a forest’s capacity to remove carbon dioxide. CTRF interviewed Colin to find out what he’s working on and why he’s excited to sit on the CTRF Advisory Board.
What role does carbon dioxide removal play in tackling climate change?
If we’re going to solve the climate crisis, we need to stop emitting carbon dioxide first and foremost. If you don’t do that, all the carbon dioxide removal in the world won’t avert a crisis.
But even if we decarbonise as fast and aggressively as we can, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change tells us that we still need to remove 10 billion tonnes of CO2 per year by 2050 if we intend to stay below our 1.5℃ target. To avoid the worst impacts of climate change, we need to stop emitting, and we need to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. We’ve just waited too long to take action.
Tell me about Funga and what you’re working on at the moment.
Funga is the translation of half a lifetime of work on how the biodiversity of all the things you can’t see in a forest – the microbes, fungi, bacteria – affect how the entire forest works. My research programme has focused on how a forest’s microbiome affects the capacity of that forest to act as a carbon sink, to buffer the earth against climate change.
Funga is translating that science into climate and biodiversity action. In really degraded landscapes, where most restoration and forestry happens, we’re asking can we reintroduce fungal biodiversity that used to inhabit these landscapes below ground? And by reintroducing that biodiversity, can we accelerate tree growth as a carbon removal solution?
Natural climate solutions, like reforestation and forestry, are probably the biggest lever for carbon removal that’s ready to scale today. What we do is identify ways where we can make the entire system more efficient and faster, while also creating a positive biodiversity outcome.
What is the soil microbiome and why is it important to carbon removal?
We have begun to apply the methods of the human microbiome project to the forest. We each have an incredibly biodiverse community of bacteria in our guts that we now know has a profound impact on our health. If you lose key aspects of bacterial biodiversity from your gut, you can become incredibly sick. Yet fecal transplants, which essentially reintroduce microbial biodiversity to your body as a restoration technique, can treat a lot of conditions caused by a breakdown in the human microbiome.
Funga does the same thing, but with the forest. We visit hundreds of forests and measure their health: how fast are they growing? How much carbon are they removing? What’s the likelihood they can survive a pathogen attack or drought event? Second, we collect a soil sample to document which microbes, particularly fungi, live in that forest. By combining this information we can start to describe what a healthy forest microbiome looks like.
As we find degraded fungal communities, which we often do in restoration and intensive forestry contexts, we can start doing a fecal transplant but in a completely different way: we use soil. That’s where our digestion happens in the forest. That’s our secret inoculant. But it’s not any soil – it’s soil that through these huge surveys we’ve identified as linked to exceptional forest health and carbon capture.
How can forest fungal networks help to address the climate crisis?
Every ecosystem on earth has a microbiome and nearly all plants on earth form a biological partnership on their roots with mycorrhizal fungi. When plants first made the evolutionary transition from living in water to living on land, they evolved a symbiosis with fungi before they even evolved roots. These organisms are foundational. They’re everywhere.
We’re coming to learn that different fungi in forests can have really varied impacts on forest health and carbon removal rates. There’s this big opportunity we’re starting to identify: if you can dial the knobs on below ground fungal biodiversity, you can also dial the knobs on carbon removal rates in a forest.
Microbiology is inherently scalable. People are planting millions and millions of acres a year, often in ex-agricultural landscapes, places where we know the microbiome looks nothing like that of an intact forest. What if instead of just planting a tree, we also planted its microbiome? Could we increase the likelihood that a tree survives? Can we accelerate the rate in which that forest establishes and therefore accelerate the rate in which it removes carbon from the atmosphere?
What has been your experience in getting funding for your research?
Funding research is always difficult. We’ve had great support for our large-scale microbiome forest health surveys and trials in different places. We’ve sampled a couple hundred forests and we’ve shown that it works. But to figure out how to do it effectively at scale, in a precise way, we need lots more.
We’re running a couple of field trials here and there, but to really understand the generality of this technology we need to replicate those field trials in many more places, under different climatic conditions, with different tree species and soil types. But, unfortunately, replication is the unsung hero of science. Figuring out all the hard work you’d have to do to scale up the soil transplant, that’s not the type of stuff that national scientific agencies love funding. Replication studies and translational science generally don’t get funded in ecology and carbon cycle science, so that becomes a really hard problem. But if you don’t do that work, you can’t hand it off to someone else to scale up and implement.
We need funding for translational carbon removal and biodiversity science that still has a lot of technical risk from a commercial perspective. And we need funding to go to players both in academia and industry, with a line of sight towards scaling these discoveries. For that reason too, we really need money without a lot of strings attached.
At the end of the day, we’re not here to get rich, we’re here to address the most pressing environmental crisis of our time.
What is your role at CTRF? What are you most excited about?
I’m excited by CTRF because they’re proposing to be a translational science funder. Ideally, they can stand up as a new funding model for translational biotech and climate science. Ideally, this could inspire a government agency to replicate these programs at even larger scales.
My role as a scientific advisor is to bring my expertise as an academic carbon cycle scientist, as a microbiologist, but also as someone who has made the jump from primary scientist to climate tech start-up. CTRF is also really focused on biological solutions, which I think is absolutely the right move. There are so many thorny but also fun and intellectually fascinating things to resolve.