Have you ever heard of a seed bank? Well they are extremely important—so important that there is a world seed bank you would think belongs in a James Bond film! The entrance to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault looks like something out of an apocalyptic movie. And indeed, one of the reasons a consortium of scientists created the vault was for worst-case scenarios.1
The Arctic Islands of Svalbard’s Global Seed Vault
To keep over 5,000 species of the world’s most valuable crops safe, the vault is in an incredibly remote location. Specifically, the vault is located on the Arctic island of Svalbard, 800 miles from the North Pole. The vault was built inside a mountain to keep it safe from missiles if warfare was ever to reach the Arctic. The entrance is approximately 426 feet above sea level, which is higher than even the least optimistic levels of sea level rise predict. Sheets of ice and piercing winds surround the entrance. Inside, the temperature is just under 25 degrees Fahrenheit and ice crystals adorn the rock walls.2
Behind airlock doors are the two seed storerooms themselves, which hold 865,871 packets of seeds representing almost half of the world’s important food crops. There are seeds from almost every country in the world, even North Korea. While many countries have their own national seed banks, the Global Seed Vault exists as a safety net.3 The seeds are preserved at negative 0.4 degrees Fahrenheit. Since the vault’s goal is to have 500 seeds of each variety, the Global Seed Vault has the capacity to store 2.5 billion seeds. The seeds are sealed and stored in custom three-ply foil packages.4
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Why are seed banks important?
According to the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity, 15 plant species now comprise 90% of all food crops. Rice, wheat, and corn account for two-thirds of that 90%. However, this situation is relatively new in the history of human agriculture; 7,000 plant species have been grown as food crops since the beginning of human agriculture.5 The rise of industrialized agriculture has led to the homogeneity of food crops. Even though industrialized agriculture is meant to provide a stable food source for a booming global population, ironically the health of a plant strain depends on diversity.6
Again and again, we watch monoculture crops, which is the continuous production of one type of crop, fall prey to disease, pests, and changing climatic conditions.7 For example, growing all of the same genetic type of crop creates a niche for pests and disease to wipe out that crop. Genetic diversity is what allows some individual plants to have a special resistance to that pest or disease, which allows the crop to survive. In the words of Michael Pollen, renowned food systems author, “Mother Nature destroys monocultures.”8
In addition to saving food crop seeds, seed banks are also crucial for the conservation of wild plant species. The Millennium Seed Bank Project at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew in England focuses specifically on the conservation of wild plants. Their goal is to secure 25% of the world’s plant species by 2020.9 The Svalbard Global Seed Vault was built in 2008.10 Cary Fowler, the executive director of the Global Crop Diversity Trust, said, “If we had built this vault a decade ago, we would have used it ten times already.”11 Fowler adds:
We didn’t actually plan this to be what some in the media have called it, which is a doomsday vault… In fact we realized that unfortunately the vault was probably going to be used sooner rather than later…We’re losing biodiversity right now, and it isn’t necessarily because of some global catastrophe.12
Seed storage containers in vault iiThe vault has already been used in fact. For example, because of war in Syria, scientists who were working on drought and heat-resistant wheat at a crucial seed bank in Aleppo, run by the International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA), have been cut off from the seed bank. In October 2015, these scientists pulled the same varieties from the Global Seed Vault and transported them to facilities in London and Morocco so that they could continue their research. The director of the ICARDA seed bank in Aleppo General Mahmoud El-Solh said of the importance of that seed bank: “this is where the cradle of agriculture (was) 10,000 years ago. In this part of the world, many of the important crops were domesticated from the wild to cultivation.” ICARDA representative Thanos Tsivelikas said that these seeds being retrieved from the Global Seed Vault is, “a rescue mission; these seeds cannot be replaced.”13
Despite the odds, Fowler is optimistic about the future of agriculture. He shared:
If the projections are correct [the earth’s environment] is certainly going to get more inhospitable, but not entirely inhospitable. The issues that I mentioned before—nutrient and water availability and climate change—are going to cause some fairly radical readjustments in agriculture if you look down the road any distance… We expect that agriculture would even survive something like an asteroid strike; after all, plants survived the last one. What we’re really trying to do up in Svalbard is preserve options.14
