The Svalbard Global Seed Vault, located deep in the Arctic permafrost, serves as a secure backup for 1.3 million unique crop seed varieties crucial to global food security. Designed to withstand natural and man-made disasters, it preserves the genetic diversity of essential food crops like wheat and rice, offering future generations a vital resource to combat climate change, pests, and disease.
What is the Seed Vault?
The Global Seed Vault, located in the permafrost of Svalbard 1300 km north of the Arctic Circle is the ultimate insurance policy for food crops that make up 80% of the world’s food supply. The vault provides long-term storage for 1.3 million unique varieties of crucial food crops from across the world (600 million individual seeds in total) within an underground cavern. These include essential food crops such as wheat, rice and beans, with the aim of safeguarding future global food security. Some seeds in storage have been developed by farmers and crop breeders over millennia.
You can take a virtual tour of the Seed Vault here.
Agricultural scientists Dr. Cary Fowler (US) and Dr. Geoffrey Hawtin (UK) approached the Norwegian Government to scope an international seed storage facility in Svalbard and, in 2004, the Norwegian Government committed to fund and establish the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. The Vault opened in 2008, with significant seed contributions from the centres of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (now CGIAR). The Vault is now managed by a partnership of Norway, NordGen and the Crop Trust to provide for the Seed Vault’s funding, management and operations.
Dr. Fowler and Dr. Hawtin received the 2024 World Food Prize for their extraordinary leadership in preserving and protecting the world’s heritage of biodiversity and mobilizing this critical resource to defend against threats to global food security.
A global collective
Video from Svalbard Global Seed Vault
Collected from national seed banks around the world, including the UK, the seeds are stored in case the national collections should be lost due to natural disaster or conflict. Once lost, they could never be recreated without the Seed Vault. It offers options for future generations of farmers and crop breeders to increase yields and look for new solutions to address the challenges of climate change and to emerging pests and diseases.
How are the seeds stored?
A temperature of −18°C is required for optimal storage of the seeds. Permafrost and thick rock ensure that the seed samples will remain frozen even without power. The seeds are sealed in custom-made, three-ply foil packages, which are sealed inside boxes and stored on shelves inside the Seed Vault. The low temperature and moisture levels inside the Seed Vault ensure low metabolic activity, keeping the seeds viable for long periods of time.
Crop diversity
The threat to crop diversity is real. In 2013, a priceless wheat gene bank in Aleppo was completely destroyed in the Syrian civil war. Wheat originated in the middle east, and the gene bank held many ancient varieties which are no longer cultivated but offer critical sources of resistance to drought, heat and disease. By 2021 the gene bank had been fully recreated in Morocco using the backup collection stored Svalbard Seed Vault, where it is once again supporting global crop breeding efforts, including those for UK wheat breeding.