Instead, it operates as a secure storage space for samples of other collections that are at risk. The Global Seed Vault is not intended to be a "Doomsday" plan, ready to replant the world in the event of a major disaster (although with the seeds of 526,129 crop varieties now safely stored, it could go some way to fulfilling that role). "We are solving a problem, and I think it is a commentary on our times that some people can't imagine that something good and positive is going on." "People all over the world are packaging up their seeds and sending them here for us to conserve," he says. The claim that we're going to put half of the Norwegian population in the vault, wait out a cataclysmic event and then repopulate the world," sighs Fowler. He got used to what he calls "the usual corporate conspiracies. "Maintaining this genetic diversity for use in crop-breeding programmes gives us another option in tackling major challenges to our food crops, such as from pests, diseases and climate change." "Svalbard is vital to global efforts to preserve the genetic variation found in our crops and their wild relatives," says Tim Wheeler, professor of crop science at the Walker Institute for Climate System Research at the University of Reading, and one of the UK's preeminent experts in the field. The Seed Vault offers at least a backup option. "This is truly astonishing." The band shift shows that higher elevations are getting warmer, affecting which plants can grow there. "At a recent conference I attended, forest geneticists were predicting that we have already moved seed zones up one zone in the past 50 years," says Dave Ellis from the National Centre for Genetic Resources Preservation in Fort Collins, Colorado. The threat to food crops from climate change is alarming scientists. But he is also supremely practical – as he needs to be, concerned, as he is, with the survival of the human race. A spectacled, rangy American with tight curls of reddish hair, he has an air of distraction coupled with sudden enthusiasms that suggests a powerful yet abstract intelligence. The trust – a UN-affiliated body funded privately and by donations from sovereign states (including the UK) – meets other costs and runs the vault, which is why Fowler is in Longyearbyen today. The $9 million (£6 million) construction costs were paid for by the Norwegian government, which also contributes a $150,000 annual grant. The Global Seed Vault opened in 2008 after engineers spent a year drilling and blasting through the sandstone, siltstone and claystone of Platåberget Mountain to create a system of subterranean chambers on the Advent Fjord's southern flank that could store 4.5 million seeds. The alternative is unimaginable – what do you get if you lose your biological foundation?" Read more: Infoporn: the biggest threats putting the world's plants in perilĪnd with that he pulls open the steel door and enters the Svalbard Global Seed Vault – an almost unfeasibly remote outpost engaged in the vital business of preserving humankind's ability to put food on its plate. The seeds we store in here are not lost, and that will literally save millions of lives. "That's why it feels so good to walk into this vault. ![]() "The work we are doing under here will save diversity that will otherwise become extinct," he says. So, 1,000 km north of the Norwegian mainland, Fowler's trust is storing the seeds of varieties that may be able to overcome the new conditions. Or, more bluntly, to stop the world from starving as its crop varieties lose the ability to adapt to climate change. ![]() ![]() Fowler's remit, as executive director of the Global Crop Diversity Trust, is "to ensure the conservation and availability of crop diversity for food security worldwide".
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