Cultivating resilience: Turning seaweed into climate security

Working early on in agriculture and sustainability, Michelle Arsjad noticed a troubling pattern: the people most vulnerable to climate change – smallholder farmers, coastal communities and women – bore the heaviest burdens.

“Farmers were expected to absorb climate risk, price volatility and ecological degradation, while solutions were designed far from their lived realities,” she explains. “Inputs were extractive, advice was generic and success was measured in short-term yield rather than long-term resilience.”

Michelle began looking for a practical solution farmers could afford and use easily, even as climate pressures grew. That search led her to the ocean, which was all around her in Indonesia.

Her start-up AquaBloom set out to produce biostimulants made from seaweed that help plants grow stronger and better withstand climate stress.

Seaweed grows naturally without freshwater, fertilizer or farmland, making it a sustainable resource. When processed correctly, seaweed enhances nutrient uptake, root development and stress tolerance in crops, allowing farmers to use less chemical fertilizer. Because it works with existing crops and farming practices, farmers don’t need to buy new equipment or change what they grow.

The model also connects two groups that rarely interact: coastal seaweed producers and land-based farmers. Farmers gain a tool to improve yields and resilience, while seaweed producers gain more stable and higher-value markets for their harvests.

To date, AquaBloom has tested its products across 27 crops, delivering 20–30 per cent yield improvements and more than a 10-times return on investment for farmers within a single growing cycle. With these results, Michelle is now preparing to scale the solution for wider commercial use.

However, building a hard-tech company came with its own unique hurdles. In the early days, acquiring technical knowledge meant spending time with farmers on the field. At the same time, as an entrepreneur, Michelle often attended late-night meetings with stakeholders.

As a young woman, Michelle also had to navigate cultural norms. For instance, being too engaged could be perceived as being “over-familiar.” And she says working through male intermediaries sometimes slowed her learning, added friction or introduced subtle biases. Once, she was advised to lower her speaking voice to sound more authoritative.

“This feedback was never about the substance of what I was saying, but about how my body and voice were read in the room,” she reflects, underscoring the invisible constraints women founders face in establishing credibility.

But Michelle says participating in the UN Women Care and Climate Entrepreneurship Accelerator, supported by Visa Foundation with contributions from the CHARLES & KEITH Group Foundation, helped her refine the company’s approach towards both business and gender.

“The programme challenged me to articulate the impact to align with unit economics,” she says. It also prompted the enterprise to shift towards designing systems that reflect how women engage with technology. AquaBloom refined its communication, creating clearer, application-focused instructions that lower the barrier to entry for women farmers who manage daily crop decisions. It also directly engaged women farmers and agronomists in trials.

Katja Freiwald, UN Women Asia and the Pacific Regional Lead for Women’s Economic Empowerment, says AquaBloom demonstrates the power of women-led solutions to strengthen livelihoods and climate resilience: “With the right partnerships and support, women entrepreneurs can scale solutions that improve food systems, incomes and climate adaptation.”

AquaBloom shows that the most effective climate solutions honour both the biological realities of the planet and the economic realities of its people. By turning seaweed into a tool for agricultural resilience, the company is proving that hard-tech innovation can be inclusive, regenerative and profitable.

According to Shraddha Kothari, Principal at Intellecap, which is advising AquaBloom through the Entrepreneurship Accelerator: “AquaBloom is positioned to unlock meaningful economic opportunities for women and other coastal producers. By transforming coastal biomass into high-value bio-stimulants, the enterprise demonstrates strong potential to drive scalable adoption of regenerative farming practices across the region.”