The secure facility, built into the side of. The world used to cultivate around 7,000 different plants but experts say we now get about 60 per cent of our calories from three main crops - maize, wheat and rice - making food supplies vulnerable if climate change causes harvests to fail. Since 2008, the Svaldbard Global Seed Vault in Norway has served as one of the last lines of defense against the annihilation of plant life on Earth. The vault also serves as a backup for plant breeders to develop new varieties of crops. The Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew in Britain will bank seeds harvested from the meadows of Prince Charles' private residence, Highgrove, including from grass species, clovers and broad-leaved flowering herbs. Stefan Schmitz, Crop Trust executive director The seed vault is the backup in the global system of conservation to secure food security on Earth. doomsday seed vault Norway plans to better protect a seed storage vault designed to protect the. On Tuesday 30 gene banks will deposit seeds, including from India, Mali, Peru and the Cherokee Nation in the United States, which will bank samples of maize, bean and squash. Norway is boosting the flood defences of its Global Seed Vault on the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard after water entered the entrance tunnel. The Svalbard Global Seed Vault, built on an Arctic mountainside in 2008, was designed as a storage facility to protect vital crop seeds against the worst cataclysms of nuclear war or disease and safeguard global food supplies.ĭubbed the "doomsday vault," the facility lies on the island of Spitsbergen in the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard, halfway between Norway and the North Pole, and is only opened a few times a year in order to preserve the seeds inside. And there are stark warnings that the genetic diversity stored within this vault will be needed to feed an ever increasing population in an increasingly harsh environment.įor the "PBS NewsHour," I'm John Bevir in Svalbard, deep in the Arctic Circle.A vault in the Arctic built to preserve seeds for rice, wheat and other food staples will contain one million varieties with the addition on Tuesday of specimens grown by Cherokee Indians and the estate of Britain's Prince Charles. The vault received inaugural shipments of 100 million seeds. A Syrian gene bank destroyed by civil war withdrew its deposits from the vault in 2015, regrew them, and returned new seeds in their place.Īfter 15 years, the number of seed varieties and the countries putting them in continues to grow. Inside the doomsday seed vault An ice covered entrance door to the international gene bank Svalbard Global Seed Vault (SGSV) near Longyearbyen on Spitsbergen, Norway, October 20, 2015. Ultimate safety net for the worlds seed collections has opened in Norway. The remoteness of the vault also helps protect it from other manmade problems. CNN’s Arwa Damon gives a behind the scenes tour of the Doomsday seed vault in Norway, that many believe to be the key to mankind’s survival. The Global Seed Vault ensures those seed samples are always available. But a lot of the work done in gene banks is aimed at providing food security for at-risk populations. In the first withdrawal from a doomsday seed vault in the Arctic, thousands of seeds that were originally kept in war-stricken Syria have been safely delivered to Morocco and Lebanon. Bread containing that wheat is now found in high-end bakeries across the world. A Look Inside the Doomsday Vault that Houses the Worlds Seeds. He quickly worked out that, although it made fantastic bread, the yield was quite low, and it grew so tall that it was difficult to harvest.īut with that height comes incredibly deep roots, and it turns out that Oland's wheat is drought-tolerant. Deep in Norway lies a collection of all of the worlds seeds buried far underground. In the 1990s, a plant breeder took some seeds from the Nordic gene bank in the hope of reintroducing this wheat. In May 2016, Magnums Jonas Bendiksen witnessed the deposit of more than 8,000 varieties of crops from sheep food to chilli peppers from Germany. This flour contains Oland's wheat, a once long-forgotten Swedish variety. There are more than 1,700 gene banks in the world, all trying to improve what we eat. An ice covered entrance door to the international gene bank Svalbard Global Seed Vault (SGSV) near Longyearbyen on Spitsbergen, Norway, October 20, 2015. This vault aims to be entirely apolitical, and operates on the belief that diverse genetic resources are an asset for humanity. The Vault was first opened in 2008 as a long-term partnership between the Norwegian government, NordGen and the Crop Trust. Of an estimated 6,000 plant species humans have eaten, just nine are now common, and three, wheat, rice and maize, provide around half of all the calories consumed globally. We live in a world of mass farming, where fewer staples are being grown.
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