Subscribe by Email
Arctic seed bank opens
by Health Patio
A “doomsday” seed vault built to protect millions of food crops from climate change, wars and natural disasters opened Tuesday deep within an Arctic mountain in the remote Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard.
“The Svalbard Global Seed Vault is our insurance policy,” Norway’s Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg told delegates at the opening ceremony. “It is the Noah’s Ark for securing biological diversity for future generations.”
It’s been dubbed a Noah’s Ark for plant life and built to withstand an earthquake or a nuclear attack. Dug deep into the permafrost of a remote Arctic mountain, the “doomsday” vault is designed by Norway to protect the world’s seeds from global catastrophe.
A Gates Foundation grant in 2007 helped developing countries send their seeds of “critical” food crops to a doomsday seed vault in an Arctic deep freeze. “The fight against hunger cannot be won without securing fast-disappearing crop biodiversity,” the Global Crop Diversity Trust and its partner the UN Foundation said in announcing the grant of 30 million dollars (22 million euros). Part of the grant by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, to which the Norwegian government added 7.5 million dollars in matching funds, went towards helping poor countries send seeds to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault.
