AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |
Back to Blog
North pole seed vault1/19/2024 ![]() ![]() These seeds remain the sovereign property of the country or institution depositing them only they can "make a withdrawal." Regional banks, in turn, store duplicates from their collections at Svalbard. Similarly, farmers deposit their seeds in regional genebanks, and also look to these banks for new varieties to help their crops adapt to, say, increasing temperatures, or resist intrusive pests. "You have regular banks that do active trading, but the Central Bank is the final reserve where the banks store their gold deposits." "If anything should happen to the resources in a regular genebank, Svalbard is the backup – it's essentially the apex of the global conservation system," says Kent Nnadozie, Secretary of the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture at the United Nations, who likens the Global Vault to the Central Reserve Bank. ![]() But many of these facilities are vulnerable to war, natural disasters, or even lack of funding. They range from small community seed banks in developing countries, where small farmers save and trade their seeds with growers in nearby villages, to specialized university collections, to national and international genetic resource repositories. More than 1700 genebanks around the globe preserve the diverse seed varieties from their regions. The Apex of the Global Conservation System ![]() "We do not trust the permafrost anymore." "Before, we trusted the permafrost," says Hege Njaa Aschim, a spokesperson for Statsbygg, the government agency that recently completed the upgrades at the seed vault. The hope: that technology can work in concert with nature's freezer to keep the world's seeds viable. In fact, record temperatures in Svalbard a few years ago – and a significant breach of water into the access tunnel to the vault - prompted the Norwegian government to invest $20 million euros on improvements at the facility to further secure the genetic resources locked inside. Yet global warming also threatens the permafrost that surrounds the seed vault, the very thing that was once considered a failsafe means of keeping these seeds frozen and safeguarding the diversity of our crops. Ī recent study in the journal Nature predicted that global warming could cause catastrophic losses of biodiversity in regions across the globe throughout this century. "We save these seeds because we want to ensure food security for future generations," says Grethe Helene Evjen, Senior Advisor at the Norwegian Ministry of Agriculture and Food. ![]() Svalbard's collection represents all the traits that will enable the plants that feed the world to adapt – with the help of farmers and plant breeders – to rapidly changing climactic conditions, including rising temperatures, more intense drought, and increasing soil salinity. It brought the total deposits in the snow-covered vault-with a capacity of 4.5 million-to 940,000.The Svalbard vault - which has been called the Doomsday Vault, or a Noah's Ark for seeds - preserves the genetic materials of more than 6000 crop species and their wild relatives, including many of the varieties within those species. The 50,000 samples deposited on Wednesday were from seed collections in Benin, India, Pakistan, Lebanon, Morocco, Netherlands, the US, Mexico, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Belarus and Britain. “The reconstituted seeds will play a critical role in developing climate-resilient crops for generations," Abousabaa said. The agency borrowed the seeds three years ago because it could not access its gene bank of 141,000 specimens in the war-torn Syrian city of Aleppo, and so was unable to regenerate and distribute them to breeders and researchers. Speaking from Svalbard, Aly Abousabaa, the head of the International Center for Agricultural Research, said Thursday that borrowing and reconstituting the seeds before returning them had been a success and showed that it was possible to “find solutions to pressing regional and global challenges." The specimens consisted of seed samples for some of the world’s most vital food sources like potato, sorghum, rice, barley, chickpea, lentil and wheat. ![]()
0 Comments
Read More
Leave a Reply. |