The Svalbard Global Seed Vault, in the far reaches of northern Norway, is meant to be humanity’s last resort. Imagine it as the world’s doomsday garden shed: a secure genetic capsule, kept safe in case some catastrophe — a meteor strike or climate disaster, perhaps — threatens the planet’s crops.
The vault already had about 1.3 million seed samples from about 7,000 species, sent from all over the world. Last week, it received about 30,000 new ones.
The number itself is notable: It’s one of the largest one-time additions since the vault opened in 2008. (There are often three deposits a year.)
But perhaps more significant is the amount of so-called genebanks — organizations that store their own hoards of seeds in locations around the world — that participated in the latest donation, said Asmund Asdal, the Norwegian vault’s coordinator.
“It is more important now that many new genebanks in developing parts of the world are depositing valuable and unique genetic material,” he wrote in an email. Some, he said, made their first contributions last week.
Svalbard is not the only place where seeds are stored. But it is meant to be a vault, a mostly sealed storage place for use in case of emergency. Most of the work of seed saving, studying and sharing happens in the genebanks. Those banks are a bit like a computer’s filing system, in which documents are stored but easily accessible. Svalbard is the external hard drive from where files can be recovered if lost.
In recent years, the vault’s organizers have extended their scope: They see their work as a race against time, Mr. Asdal said, particularly in reaching out to developing countries or rural communities, to protect against the possibility that genebanks could be destroyed by calamities such as severe weather, conflict or equipment malfunction.
As Mike Bollinger, executive director of the Seed Savers Exchange, a nonprofit seed bank in the United States, put it: “If you lose it, it’s gone forever.”
The recruitment push — and the size of the latest deposit of samples — reflects “the growing stress, the urgency, the need to act in times of climate change,” said Stefan Schmitz, executive director of Crop Trust, which operates the Svalbard vault alongside the Norwegian government and NordGen, a genetic research center.
This time, 23 genebanks made contributions, one of the largest groups to do so in a single window since 2020. There are more than 1,750 genebanks around the world, according to Crop Trust.
“These deposits reflect a widespread awareness that the climate in which humans have thrived for the past 10,000 years is now gone,” Laurie Parsons, an academic at Royal Holloway, University of London, who studies climate change, wrote in an email.
The end of the world, at least as humans know it, may not come from a single disaster. Genebanks also guard against the possibility of a gradual demise. And seeds, like eggs, are safer in several baskets.
Among the threats, the climate crisis looms large. In 2023, the hottest year on record, around 2.3 billion people faced moderate or severe food insecurity, according to the World Health Organization. Researchers have also found that more than a third of the world’s tree species are threatened with extinction. Many of the vault’s new seeds come from areas suffering from disastrous floods or raging heat waves, which makes crop production harder.
More immediate threats come from human conflict. Fighting has displaced farmers and bombs have obliterated crops.
The first withdrawal from the Svalbard vault happened in 2015, after Syria’s civil war devastated a seed bank near Aleppo. Recovery samples were shipped to stores in Lebanon and Morocco.
This year, some seeds have arrived from the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories. More will arrive early next year from Sudan, which has been pummeled by hunger and civil war.
There are other concerns. Seeds do not keep forever. Genetically modified crops often used in industrial-scale agriculture have edged out older varieties. That can leave local chefs and gardeners, who grow and use traditional seeds, as important cogs in the machinery of preserving diversity.
Dr. Schmitz said he thought that the future of climate-resilient agriculture might rest on seeds that farmers have overlooked for decades. The 1,145 deposits from Chad, for instance, have adapted to withstand a harsh climate. They could be useful to researchers trying to grow crops resistant to heat and irregular rainfall.
“Mankind forgot, a little bit, the richness, the wealth of what we have,” Dr. Schmitz said.
Svalbard — an archipelago that is also home to other records of humanity, such as the Arctic Web Archive, a major data storage center — is key to the preservation.
But the Arctic is changing.
Last year, temperatures there were rising four times as fast as in other parts of the world. Melting permafrost led to a small flood at the vault’s entrance in 2016. (Those issues have since been fixed, Dr. Schmitz said, and the floodwater pooled far from the seed stores.)
Despite the rising temperatures, the seeds should be safe in Svalbard’s vault, which stays well below freezing point even without electricity, Dr. Schmitz noted.
Nothing, he acknowledged, was 100 percent sure, but, he added, “I would say that is the safest place of all you could find on Earth for such an endeavor.”
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