Climate change and its global societal and environmental impacts are an area we must address immediately to ensure a healthy and sustainable future. At this nexus lies the opportunity to develop a vibrant and sustainable global bioeconomy by harnessing research collaboration across disciplines to best address the challenges at hand. Advances in genetic transformation technologies and genetic tool development in a rapidly growing number of organisms have greatly improved our understanding of underlying design principles for engineering of both plants and microbes towards more sustainable agriculture, plant feedstocks, and bioproduction of a growing number of chemicals and products to displace those currently derived from fossil fuels. Innovative and grand scale ideas will be required to solve the climate crisis, and we have an opportunity to make a real impact by gathering genetic engineering experts across plant and microbial communities to share strategies, tools, technologies, and scalable methods to address global problems. With a combination of academic, government, and industry perspectives, we can build on what we are uncovering in basic and applied research as well as industrial advances in strategies, technology and scaling up for viable implementation of global solutions. This unique meeting will bring together genetic engineers with plant scientists and microbiologists and climate scientists to address big picture problems and serve to develop a collective and coordinated vision for the future.

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