Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment awards 2026 research grants

From the environmental triggers of heart disease to brick kilns blackening the skies over South Asia, this year’s Environmental Venture Projects and Realizing Environmental Innovation Program awardees are tackling sustainability challenges at every scale.

The Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment is awarding more than $4,290,105 million to 21 research teams seeking innovative solutions to pressing environmental issues. This year, Woods is supporting ten Environmental Venture Projects (EVP) and five Realizing Environmental Innovation Program (REIP) projects alongside four Big Ideas for Oceans projects and two Human and Planetary Health Early Career Awards.

The EVP program provides up to $250,000 per team for interdisciplinary research that seeks to identify solutions to critical problems of the environment and sustainability. The REIP program provides up to $500,000 per team, and provides next stage funding to move existing research projects toward solutions implemented by public stakeholders and market actors. Since EVP began in 2004 and REIP began in 2015, Woods has awarded $39.9 million in grants to 230 research teams representing all seven of Stanford’s schools and working in over 37 different countries. These projects have gone on to receive more than $110 million in additional funding from other sources.

2026 Realizing Environmental Innovation Program awards

Building sustainable septic systems in Lowndes County, Alabama
William Tarpeh, Khalid Osman

Access to sanitation is a human right, but failing and unmonitored septic systems remain common in low-income communities across the United States. In Lowndes County, Alabama — a predominantly African-American, low-income, rural community — 34 percent of residents test positive for hookworm due to inadequate sanitation. This project will partner with the Center for Rural Enterprise and Environmental Justice (CREEJ), the county commission, and national advocacy organizations to establish a community-led monitoring program integrating low-cost sensors, environmental sampling, and routine surveys. Over three years, the researchers will co-design new septic systems with residents, develop monitoring tools to improve system longevity, and assess performance, costs, and equity outcomes — providing a model for climate-resilient sanitation upgrades in marginalized communities.

Mapping the true carbon removal potential of natural climate solutions worldwide
Steve Davis, Adam Pellegrini

Natural Climate Solutions (NCS) – such as improved livestock grazing, cover cropping, and reforestation – are widely cited as having significant carbon removal potential. But existing analyses lack geographic precision and fail to account for system-wide emissions that can offset carbon gains. This project will build high-resolution global maps evaluating the net carbon removal potential of NCS approaches at any location worldwide, accounting for both emissions and real implementation costs. The researchers will partner with carbon credit companies to translate findings into practical tools — including a dashboard to help project developers assess the feasibility and cost-effectiveness of NCS investments.

Integrating ecosystem services into Chile's forestry sector
Gretchen Daily, Adam Pellegrini

In 2023, Chile created the Natural Capital Committee (NCC), a government entity focused on including the value of nature in policymaking and financial decisions. Chile's forestry sector spans 3 million hectares of plantations that have driven significant impacts on water, biodiversity, and fire risk — including the record-breaking megafires of 2017 and 2023. This project will develop a decision-making framework that helps government and industry evaluate forestry options by explicitly accounting for ecosystem services like water regulation, carbon storage, and fire risk. Working directly with the NCC and ARAUCO, Chile's largest forestry company, the researchers will co-design this process through participatory workshops and negotiations and produce maps, guidance, and open software tools to help mainstream the value of nature in forestry planning at scale.

GeoMatch: an AI tool to help climate migrants find communities where they can thrive
Jens Hainmueller, Helene Benveniste, Dominik Rothenhaesler

Climate change is reshaping human migration patterns: estimates suggest that 50 million to 250 million people may experience displacement due to climate change by 2050, with disproportionate impacts on vulnerable communities in the Global South. This trend has created urgent demand for tools that can help migrants find destinations where they are most likely to thrive. This project will expand GeoMatch, a machine learning platform that has already helped match over 15,000 migrants to communities in Switzerland, the Netherlands, Canada, and the United States based on job skills and local compatibility. The team will build on this foundation by adding a new capability: helping migrants identify feasible legal pathways for relocation, with a particular focus on labor mobility programs that can facilitate climate migration.

Scaling a low-cost intervention to cut emissions from South Asian brick kilns
Steve Luby, Grant Miller

Coal-fired brick kilns across Southeast Asia affect global warming as much as the entire U.S. passenger car fleet, and in India alone, brick kiln air pollution resulted in an estimated 24,100 excess adult deaths in 2015. This project will scale Zigzag 2.0 — a low-cost intervention that trains kiln managers and workers on operational practices that reduce coal consumption by 26 percent and carbon dioxide emissions by 20 percent. Over three years, the team will convert 100+ kilns per year in Bangladesh, develop a marketing strategy for selling carbon credits generated by these upgrades, and use credit revenue to fund further kiln conversions — establishing a self-sustaining model for reducing industrial emissions across South Asia.

2026 Environmental Venture Project awards

Searching for the environmental triggers of Kawasaki disease
Jennifer Burney, Alison Marden

Kawasaki disease, an inflammatory syndrome that causes swelling in blood vessels, is the leading cause of acquired heart disease in children under five. Its exact cause remains unknown despite decades of research, but evidence strongly points to an inhaled environmental aerosol as the trigger. This project will analyze relationships between disease incidence, atmospheric circulation and aerosol composition using the two richest Kawasaki disease datasets available, drawn from Japan and the U.S. The researchers aim to narrow the search for the specific environmental trigger and build predictive models that could alert clinicians when conditions favor a disease outbreak.

Getting plastic out of compost
Angelle LaBeaud, Scott Fendorf, Alison Hoyt, William Mitch

Composting diverts organic waste from landfills, recovers nutrients, and reduces methane emission. However, plastic contamination is a growing problem as composting programs expand, and fears of plastic pollution discourage farmers from applying compost to their fields. No standard protocol exists for detecting and measuring plastic contamination across the full range of particle sizes. This project will develop that protocol for use at commercial compost facilities, and test two methods of plastic removal: heating it to high temperatures to break down plastic into biochar, a carbon-rich material that can be applied to soil, and introducing earthworms to biologically degrade plastic. Working in close collaboration with leading composters across California’s Salinas Valley, a interdisciplinary team of soil scientists, environmental engineers, and epidemiologists aims to make composting safer and expand its agricultural use.

Unlocking the value in mining waste to reduce its environmental harm
Erik Sperling, Jef Caers

Mining the metals and minerals needed for the clean energy transition carries a significant environmental cost. One of the primary hazards is pyrite, a common mineral in mining waste that oxidizes on contact with air and water, producing sulfuric acid and releasing heavy metals into surrounding waterways. Removing pyrite from mining waste streams could reduce this harm – and because pyrite contains extractable sulfur and critical metals, it could also generate economic value. To achieve this, the researchers will first quantify the extractable materials available, then use AI-driven computational screening to optimize chemical reagents for pyrite extraction. The goal is a framework that aligns economic incentives with environmental protection, making cleaner, safer mining more financially viable.

Testing a low-cost, fungi-based building material to combat extreme heat
Debbie Senesky, John Openshaw, Rishee Jain

Residents of informal settlements, colloquially called slums, often lack the resources to adapt to extreme heat. This project seeks to develop and test a novel building material made from mycelium – the root-like network of fungi – grown on bamboo, a fast-growing, widely available material in the tropics. The resulting composite material can be bonded directly to the corrugated tin roofs commonly used in these settlements, providing low-cost insulation. Over a period of two years, the team will test the insulation properties of bamboo-backed mycelium materials in laboratory settings, deploy a prototype roofing structure in Makassar, Indonesia to evaluate its durability in the field, and develop a roadmap for scaling local production.

Analyzing historical maps with AI to inform sustainable land use planning
Solomon Hsiang, Zephyr Frank, Stephen Redding

Land use decisions – designing a city, building a highway, or designating land for conservation – can have long-term consequences on environmental and public health. But the long-term effects of these decisions are often poorly understood, in part because historical land use data is scarce. For example, the impact of increasing urbanization in East African cities on local ecosystems, energy use, and quality of life is largely unknown. Millions of hand-drawn and printed maps capturing historical land use exist worldwide, but extracting usable data from them currently requires hundreds of hours of manual labor per map. This project will develop the first AI foundation model capable of transforming scanned historical map images into structured geographic data — converting what is currently an inaccessible visual archive into an analytical resource that researchers and policymakers can use to understand the long-term consequences of land use decisions at global scale.

Mapping underground fungal networks from space to promote forest health
Elliot White Jr., Kabir Peay, Eva Scheller

Diverse networks of fungi lie below forest floors, governing key ecological processes like carbon storage and nutrient cycling. Yet the composition and structure of these communities remain poorly understood, partly because mapping belowground biology at landscape scales is difficult and costly. As climate change and land use change accelerates, this knowledge gap limits our ability to evaluate forest restoration and refine climate models. This project will integrate high-resolution hyperspectral satellite imagery with field-based environmental DNA profiling of soil-fungal communities across Haida Gwaii, British Columbia – a coastal temperate rainforest where roughly two-thirds of the forest has been logged. Co-developed with Indigenous-led institutions on Haida Gwaii, the project will evaluate whether satellite observations of the forest canopy can predict belowground fungal recovery, delivering monitoring tools and spatial data to support Haida-led forest stewardship.

A synthetic biology approach to replacing nitrogen fertilizers in agriculture
Ellen Yeh, Matthias Garten

Nitrogen is essential for crop productivity in agriculture. Most plants, including all major cereal crops, depend on soil bacteria that transform atmospheric nitrogen into natural fertilizer in a process called nitrogen fixation. Industrial agriculture bypasses this dependence by using fossil fuels to produce synthetic fertilizers, which are essential to feeding nearly half the world’s population but contribute to greenhouse gas emissions, soil degradation, and coastal dead zones. Through a novel synthetic biology approach, the researchers will physically introduce nitrogen-fixing bacteria directly into plant cells, where they can act as a built-in fertilizer factory. The goal is a proof-of-concept plant cell that can host these bacteria, laying the groundwork for engineered crop species that could one day fully replace synthetic fertilizers.

Engineering yeast to sustainably recover rare earth elements
Guosang Hong, Leaora Dresselhaus-Marasi, Phillip Kyriakakis

Rare earth elements are critical components of clean energy technologies — from electric vehicles to wind turbines to computer chips — but sourcing them relies on mining and refining methods that are energy-intensive and generate toxic waste. This project will develop a biological alternative: the Lanthanide Extraction and Sensor System (LESS), which engineers common baker's yeast to detect, capture, and separate rare earth elements from unconventional sources like industrial waste and mine drainage. Unlike existing methods that require harsh acids and complex chemical processes, LESS uses a highly selective naturally occurring protein and the readily recyclable compound urea to recover these materials under gentle conditions. The goal is to transform a toxic environmental hazard into a domestic supply of critical materials.

Modeling the health impacts of air pollution
Jeremy Goldhaber-Fieber, Marissa Reitsma 

Air pollution, especially outdoor fine particulate matter (PM2.5), has been linked to chronic conditions like heart disease, stroke, and lung cancer. In rapidly growing urban centers like Mexico City, that disease burden is intensified by population density and other compounding health risks. This project will use simulation models to project future trends in air pollution-related chronic disease across a range of pollution scenarios over the next 30 years. Drawing on newly available datasets on disease prevalence, mortality, and PM2.5 levels in Mexico City from 1990 to 2020, the researchers will identify how cumulative pollution exposure drives disease outcomes and model the health benefits of potential policy interventions — equipping Mexican policymakers with evidence to evaluate air quality policies and their impacts on health equity.

Capturing the full value of mangroves as a climate resilience tool
David Cohen, Jim Leape, Fio Micheli 

Mangroves sequester carbon, provide nursery habitat, and protect coastal ecosystems – but they are under serious threat. In Indonesia, which is home to over a fifth of the world’s mangroves, 52,000 hectares are deforested each year. Because financial calculations often undervalue mangrove ecosystem services, short-term economic gains from coastal development often prevail at the expense of mangrove deforestation. This project will design a policy tool that captures the value of mangrove ecosystem services and integrates this valuation directly into local coastal planning. Through field research in three priority mangrove habitats, the researchers will identify local drivers of mangrove loss and develop a standardized Mangrove Value Metric. They will also map governance and enforcement gaps to design incentive-based interventions that promote conservation. The findings will be synthesized into a toolkit for broader use across the region.