Engineering Ecosystem Resilience
Living organisms underpin our food, climate stability, and materials – ecological collapse threatens the foundations of civilisation. By pairing advanced monitoring with resilience-boosting interventions, we could halt biodiversity loss and enable people and nature to thrive.
What is an opportunity space?
Opportunity spaces are areas of research that we believe are ripe for breakthroughs. They are defined by our Programme Directors, and must be highly consequential for society, under-explored relative to their potential impact, and ripe for new talent, perspectives, or resources to change what’s possible.
Core beliefs
The core beliefs that underpin this opportunity space:
With ecosystem degradation accelerating globally, humanity’s most vital unsolved technical capability is engineering ecosystem resilience → success could pave the way towards unparalleled human and planetary prosperity.
Our tools to measure, predict, and manage ecosystems are insufficient → effective stewardship demands proactive deployment of fit-for-purpose technologies.
Ecosystems are complex adaptive networks where small changes can have outsized effects → with the right tools, we can design highly effective interventions that are both ethical and environmentally responsible.
Converging advances in high-throughput genomics and prediction, gene editing, accelerated evolution, robotics, novel sensors, and AI analytics → together unlock a new integrative paradigm for engineering ecosystem resilience.
Programme development: Accelerated Adaptation
We are in the process of building a multi-year R&D programme within this space. We have now published our thesis – Accelerated Adaptation – which outlines our latest thinking.
Funding in this opportunity space
Opportunity seeds
Application deadline: 02 February 2026 (14:00 GMT)
Outside of programmes, we award seed funding to individuals or teams pursuing research aligned with our opportunity spaces. With smaller budgets and less structure than programmes, seeds support researchers to uncover new pathways that might otherwise fall through the cracks.
We’re looking to fund high potential proposals with up to £500,000 each. We initially expect to fund around 10 opportunity seeds in this space.
Proposals should either align with or challenge the assumptions of the Summary, Beliefs, or Observations in this opportunity space, but sit outside of the scope of the Accelerated Adaptation programme thesis.
More details on what is in and out of scope can be found in the call for proposals below.
Funding resources
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