Brazil’s Sucuriú River, known for its clear spring-fed waters. (Azzedine Rouichi/Unsplash)

 

Shaping future ecosystems through eco-augmentation

GESDA Academic Forum Chair and Board member Michael Hengartner leads a high-level anticipation workshop looking at how humans could enhance nature’s ecosystems.

By John Heilprin

April 5, 2024

 

Just days before GESDA’s High Level Anticipation Workshop on Eco-Augmentation, the International Union of Geological Sciences announced in late March after a series of internal votes that it has decided we are not formally living in a new epoch of geological time defined by the far-reaching impacts that humans have made on the planet since 1950.

Despite rejecting the Anthropocene epoch as a new formal unit of the Geological Time Scale, IUGS acknowledged that the increasingly widely accepted and popular environmental concept “will nevertheless continue to be used not only by Earth and environmental scientists, but also by social scientists, politicians and economists, as well as by the public at large. It will remain an invaluable descriptor of human impact on the Earth system.”

The proposal for a new epoch had been years in the making, based in part on sediment found at the bottom of a lake in Ontario, Canada, that contained artificial radionuclides from weapons testing, or what it called markers of human-caused planetary change. And with the dizzying pace of recent scientific and technological advances in areas such as synthetic biology – redesigning organisms for useful purposes by engineering them with new abilities – humans are poised to go even further in altering our basic relationship with nature.

That was the theme of GESDA’s workshop on eco-augmentation, which was timely in a purely coincidental fashion in the wake of IUGS’ announcement. Led by GESDA Academic Forum Chair Michael Hengartner, the workshop cultivated insights from a couple dozen top scientists worldwide who met for three days in Villars, Switzerland to consider how we might use new tools to shape Earth’s climate-impacted ecosystems.

Hengartner, a GESDA Board member who is president of the ETH Board governing Switzerland’s two Federal Institutes of Technology in Lausanne and Zurich and four federal research institutes, said the aim of the March 25-27 workshop was to examine the ways that eco-augmentation could bring about new opportunities and breakthroughs over the next quarter century, while not overlooking the potential hurdles and ethical consequences.

“We know that our ecosystems are changing. Ecosystems are always changing. But given the strong drive of climate change, they’re changing very rapidly. Humans are dramatically changing the environment also through their own actions directly: highways, urbanization, ecosystem degradation,” he said in an interview just after the workshop ended.

“And the question that we tried to discuss with the scientists over the last few days is what can we do about it? What should we do about it? What tools do we have and what knowledge do we have to intervene with the ultimate goal of being stewards of a planet that will be livable and will be a good place to be, not only for humans but, in fact, for all the other species with which we’re sharing this planet,” Hengartner said. “So a very lofty goal, very difficult to implement, you know, operationally at the end. But a topic that is extremely important for the long term success of our species and the others on this blue dot.”

Michael Hengartner leading the Villars eco-augmentation workshop (J. Heilprin)

‘A lot can be done with current technology’

During the sessions, participants were asked to detail their latest research and share their perspectives on how eco-augmentation, a term that describes one of the prominent themes in the GESDA Science Breakthrough Radar®, intersects with philosophy, ethics, policy and international law, and to describe what it all means and what can be done. They also were advised to consider highly ambitious, action-oriented goals – namely those that can advance novel solution ideas for accelerating the United Nations’ 17 Sustainable Development Goals for 2030, many of them related to planetary health – with the view that the best way to reach a goal is not to aim for that goal, but to aim for a much more ambitious goal.

“It helped us tremendously move forward in our own thought process,” he said of the workshop. “It helped us understand better the boundary conditions and where experts positioned themselves along the spectrum. We also wanted to see how much technological development might happen over the next decades and what that might mean for this field. And an interesting feedback there was that, in fact, a lot can be done with current technology. There’s no need to wait for new technologies to be able to do a lot of what needs to be done, what could be done. Which also, of course, is an insight that allows us to say, well, rather than discussing how to move forward in the future together, we should discuss right now what can be done.”

Just what is eco-augmentation? “It’s a new term. The closest analogy I have is with another very young word called neuro-augmentation. And there the idea is that one can, through external impacts, external activity, improve the way your nervous system works,” Hengartner said.

“Neuro-augmentation, eco-augmentation – can we also improve ecosystems? Can we make them better at whatever they’re supposed to be doing?” he said. “This can happen through boundary conditions, changing the environment, reorganizing the species that are presently there, perhaps adding a new species or reintroducing a species that has been lost, or perhaps by changing one of the species, introducing a gene, for example, if, one of the major species in this ecosystem is attacked by a virus, by a bacteria, by disease. Shall we immunize these animals to protect them? Shall we perhaps even change their genomic DNA so that they become resistant to this pathogen? Things like that.”

 

Bringing ‘options’ and ‘alternative paths’ to light

The Villars High-Level Anticipatory Workshops aim to obtain the diverse perspectives of a wide range of experts on a series of cutting-edge topics and facilitate in-depth discussions among them regarding the anticipated developments in those fields over the next five, 10 and 25 years. The outcomes of these discussions are reported as part of the Radar and form the basis of more discussions at the GESDA annual summits about future research and the potential for taking action, letting others decide what to do.

“GESDA tries to identify areas where discussion is needed and perhaps action is needed. GESDA does not identify the action. It would be arrogant of us to think that two dozen scientists in a room can decide for humanity what the best course of action is,” Hengartner explained.

“Which is why what we try to do is bring this then to the attention of stakeholders. Bring it to the Summit. Bring it to the attention of diplomats of governments, of NGOs, and then have society basically discuss,” he said. “So we’re the honest broker where we say, ‘Look, these are options that we have. These are alternative paths. And we think it would be good to discuss these now rather than just blindly going forward and then realizing, oh, we took that path without even making a conscious choice, and maybe we should have taken the other path.’ So that’s actually what we’re here for. We wanted to have multiple views in that room. If everybody was of the same opinion, we probably would be blinded.”

At this latest workshop, some participants spoke of opportunities for action in areas such as imposing regulations on international research using invertebrates or stemming more biodiversity losses through stricter controls on agriculture, using solutions that exist already. The workshop was held under the Chatham House Rule, meaning participants are free to use the information they receive but no quote can be attributed to any particular individual.

They examined how humans might be able to influence the planet’s ecosystems from the standpoint of three different themes. The first is our growing ability to read and write ecosystems. The second is how we can use transitioning ecosystems to learn more about the limits of life at the extremes. And the third is the tool of hacking co-evolution, a process of reciprocal evolutionary change as species apply selection pressure on one another.

“We’re improving,” Hengartner emphasized about the workshop’s aim. “It could be that you need to remove an invasive neophyte, for example, it could be that you need to get rid of a source of pollution. Augmentation can even just be remediation. We have a polluted ecosystem and we’re trying to bring it back to where it was before we polluted it. It’s improving the system that is currently there. So we’re not trying to make an ecosystem necessarily better than the natural ecosystem. We’re simply trying to make it better than its current state.”

The ability to read ecosystems and understand their interactions at multiple scales stems from advances in genomics, synthetic biology and artificial intelligence. We can decode entire genomes of organisms, but many unknowns remain about organisms’ needs and how they evolve in an ecosystem. We lack theoretical frameworks to shift from conducting experiments to designing interventions using molecular, geological and climate knowledge.

To better understand transitioning ecosystems, particularly those in climate-driven transitions, we need to study how organisms measure and respond to space and time at a physical and chemical level. As climate change transforms or kills off ecosystems, however, the window is closing for important data collection and bioprospecting. This is most noticeable at the interface of the cryosphere and hydrosphere and in the deep seas.

The tool of hacking co-evolution refers to how species evolve based on the ecosystems in which they live. As climate change impacts ecosystems, the human genome faces evolutionary pressures, making our ability to develop tools that can reshape our environment and the organisms within it increasingly valuable. Big questions remain about how we should go about re-engineering Earth, but what is clear is that our knowledge of how humans and ecosystems co-evolve is critical to the future of humanity and the planet.

“Sometimes we manage nature for our own purpose and not for the purpose of the ecosystem. In eco-augmentation, we try to improve the ecosystem, perhaps at a cost for humans,” said Hengartner. “Not abstracting the human from the ecosystem. We are part of the ecosystem. So we’re part of this, but we also impact on it.”

 

 

Tools ‘at our fingertips’

The Global Tipping Points Report launched at the UN climate summit in December showed that fossil fuel burning and emissions from agriculture and other land uses must be quickly phased out. “The 21st century has already witnessed extraordinary, abrupt and potentially irreversible changes in the world around us,” according to the report’s findings by 200 researchers from 90 organizations in 26 countries. “When presented with such complexity and tumultuous change, we cannot continue looking at the world in an outdated way.”

A study published in Nature by some of the world’s most prominent scientists last year also indicated there is little time to waste. International scientific experts on the Earth Commission found that Earth has already pushed past the “safe and just limit” set in seven of eight scientific targets meant to protect our planet’s life support systems. The commission tried to identify when people might face serious harm from climate change or the loss of biodiversity.

One of the Villars eco-augmentation workshop participants, the internationally renowned evolutionary molecular biologist Beth Shapiro, is an expert in “de-extinction” – which she defines as the resurrection of core, specific phenotypes that make an animal look and act the way it does – as detailed in her 2015 book, How to Clone a Mammoth.

In a brief interview outside the workshop, she said that people have been manipulating the evolution of everything around us for as long as we have existed as a species, by driving things to extinction and introducing species to different landscapes through domestication of animals and agriculture. The 20th century saw a rapid growth in our ability to manipulate species, she noted, and every species that’s a candidate for de-extinction or augmentation has a different list of technical, ethical and ecological challenges associated with it.

“These tools that are at our fingertips are an extension of this. It’s moving into an era where we can do this more quickly and with more precision, and I think this is absolutely necessary, as clearly habitats around the world are changing at a rate that outpaces the capacity of evolution by natural selection to keep up. And this is where these tools come in handy. We can speed up the process of adaptation,” Shapiro said.

“And I think if we want to live in a world that is both biodiverse and filled with people, we’re going to have to become more comfortable with using these tools,” she added. “We’re going to have to figure out how to mitigate risks, how to assess what these risks might be, how to do this in an ethical way with community engagement and diplomatic engagement. And this is going to be a hard thing for the world to do together. But it’s absolutely necessary if we want a positive and biodiverse future.”

A multifunctional ’scape across land, freshwater and marine biomes, including
large, intact wilderness spaces (blue circles), shared spaces (yellow circles) and
anthromes (red circles) (IPBES/IPCC)

Where the science and diplomacy can take us

The 2023 GESDA Science Breakthrough Radar®, distilling the insights of 848 scientists from 73 countries, tells us that future advances in our understanding of the components of ecosystems, their interactions and evolutionary dynamics, combined with progress in genomics, synthetic biology and data science, will allow novel interventions at the scale of entire ecosystems. Given these possibilities, breakthroughs that enable the deliberate modification of the global ecosystem will alter how we perceive the relationship between humanity and the Earth.

The findings in the 2023 Science Breakthrough Radar®

Based on the Radar, here’s where we stand in several important areas:

2.2.3 Engineered organism and AI-based tools

Synthetic organisms and AI will help advance genome editing for human applications in several crucial ways. For starters, synthetic organisms will provide improved ways to deliver the editing payload to the cell and experimental organisms that provide a better proxy for human testing.

Anticipation in a nutshell

5-year horizon: Synthetic biology circuits go in vivo
10-year horizon: Chimeras, synthetic viruses and other models become mainstream
25-year horizon: Universal editors emerge

Radar, page 96.

3. Eco-regeneration and geoengineering

The current state of the planet presents one of the most pressing issues ever faced by humanity. Concerns about warming, pollution and biodiversity are only compounded by the forecast rise in human population, which is expected to reach nearly 10 billion by 2050. Advances in science and technology will be vital for monitoring and mitigating problematic trends, and for establishing new ways for humanity to live on a changing planet.

Radar, page 124.

3.1. Decarbonization

Greenhouse gas emissions in 2022 were the largest in history: humanity released 36.1 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide (GtCO2), 1.5 percent more than in 2021. Due to this atmospheric carbon, Earth has already warmed by more than 1° Celsius compared to the late 19th century. There is now a 66 percent chance that the annual global temperature will be more than 1.5° above pre-industrial levels for at least one year between 2023 and 2027.

Radar, page 126.

3.2 Earth Systems Modeling

The concept of the Earth system can be traced to James Lovelock’s much-discussed Gaia hypothesis, which posited that all of Earth is a self-regulating whole. While aspects of Lovelock’s proposal remain controversial, the core notion of significant interactions between elements of the Earth system — oceans, atmosphere, land, Arctic and Antarctic ice (the cryosphere) and biosphere — has proved correct.

Radar, page 132.

3.5 Ocean Stewardship

The ocean is central to the existence of life on Earth. However, human activity is putting increasing strain on the ocean, directly through activities such as overfishing and pollution, and indirectly through the emission of greenhouse gases and associated anthropogenic climate change.

Radar, page 150.

5.5 Synthetic Biology

Synthetic biology is a set of technologies which enable the modification and creation of living cells and organisms, and of their building blocks. These include genome editing, artificially evolving biomolecules, tissue engineering and potentially even the creation of synthetic organisms. Collectively, these could lead to major breakthroughs in fundamental biology, as well as a multitude of possible applications in fields ranging from nutrition to pharmaceuticals and engineering.

Radar, page 236.