Engineering the biosphere through synthetic organisms: an alternative to climate change

Abstract

Our planet is experiencing an accelerated process of change associated to a variety of anthropogenic phenomena. The future of this transformation is uncertain, but there is general agreement about its negative unfolding that might threaten our own survival. Furthermore, the pace of the expected changes is likely to be abrupt: catastrophic shifts might be the most likely outcome of this ongoing, apparently slow process, associated to carbon dioxide accumulation or ecosystem degradation. What we propose as an alternative to this possible future is the design of synthetic organisms, capable of reproducing and expanding to large geographic scales with the goal of achieving a long term or a transient restoration of ecosystem-level homeostasis. Such a regional or even planetary scale engineering would have to deal with the complexity of our biosphere. It will require not only a proper design of organisms but also understanding their place within ecological networks and their evolvability. This is a likely future scenario that will require integration of ideas coming from currently weakly connected domains, including synthetic biology, ecological and genome engineering, evolutionary theory, climate science, biogeography and invasion ecology, among others.