The Svalbard facility is effectively a backup of the backups.Īmazing views here of the Svalbard global seed vault. Seed collectors from 36 banks around the world – eight for the first time – brought seeds for accessions, the term used for new samples entering the bank. “Now we have planned for worst case scenarios in a better way,” she says. Solberg told New Scientist that the fact the facility had required upgrading so soon after its opening was a symbol that climate change is coming more rapidly than expected.
#Propose doomsday vault upgrade#
The latest deposit marks the first time the vault has opened its doors to new seeds since a €20 million upgrade that includes a new waterproofed access tunnel, plus measures to prepare it for a world on track to be several degrees hotter by the century’s end. Read more: The race to find wild relatives of food plants before it’s too late While the vault itself was untouched, that year the Arctic experienced record heat that scientists say was almost certainly due to human-made climate change. Yet in October 2016, the entrance tunnel to the facility was flooded due to a combination of heavy rainfall and permafrost melting. The permafrost on Spitsbergen, the island in the Svalbard archipelago where the bank is located, means the seeds should stay frozen even if the cooling system that keeps the vault at -18☌ is hit by a power failure. However, the resilience of the vault itself has recently come under the spotlight. The first withdrawal from the bank took place in 2015, to help conservationists who lost access to a major seed bank in Aleppo in the Syrian civil war. The vault is designed as the ultimate insurance policy for restoring crop diversity to smaller seed banks around the world after extreme weather, conflict, fire and other events. The first seeds in today’s major deposit have gone into the Svalbard seed vault.
Speaking in Svalbard, the president of Ghana Nana Akufo-Addo said of the vault: “It is the great insurance policy for food security.” Agriculture in Ghana is already under pressure from climate change, he added. “The deposit event is especially timely,” she said ahead of the event, because this is the year by which countries should have safeguarded the genetic diversity of crops to meet the United Nations goal of eliminating hunger by 2030. Norwegian prime minister Erna Solberg attended the mass deposit, the single biggest since the opening of the facility in 2008. As the snow came down, teams at seed banks from Portugal to Mexico walked their valuable cargo into the entrance tunnel, their names read out by one by one. In twilight on the mountainside where the vault’s iconic entrance juts out, the first seeds were delivered to a backdrop of a male choir singing.
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