Norway’s Arctic ‘doomsday vault’ stocks up on 60,000 more food seeds

A "doomsday vault" nestled deep in the Arctic received 60,000 new seed samples on Tuesday, including Prince Charles' cowslips and Cherokee sacred corn, increasing stocks of the world's agricultural bounty in case of global catastrophe.

Published: 25 February 2020 17:35 CET

Norway’s Arctic 'doomsday vault' stocks up on 60,000 more food seeds

A file photo of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. Photo: AFP

Mounting concern over climate change and species loss is driving groups worldwide to add their seeds to the collection inside a mountain near Longyearbyen on Spitsbergen Island in Norway's Svalbard archipelago, about 1,300 kilometres from the North Pole.

The “Noah's Ark” of food crops is set up to preserve plants that can feed a growing population facing climate change.

“As the pace of climate change and biodiversity loss increases, there is new urgency surrounding efforts to save food crops at risk of extinction,” said Stefan Schmitz, who manages the reserve as head of the Crop Trust.

“The large scope of today's seed deposit reflects worldwide concern about the impacts of climate change and biodiversity loss on food production,” Schmitz added.

A total of 36 regional and international institutions have contributed to the 60,000 samples that were to be deposited later Tuesday.

Among the seeds are beans, squash and corn from the Cherokee Nation — the first Native American group to send crops to the vault — including their sacred White Eagle corn.

Britain's Prince Charles, who is known for his environmental advocacy, sent the seeds of 27 wild plants, including cowslips and orchids collected from the meadows of Highgrove, his country home.

“It has proved to be an exhausting and often demoralizing task to persuade people of the utterly essential role played by all this diversity in maintaining vibrant, healthy ecosystems that sustain both people and our planet,” the Prince of Wales said in a statement.

“It's more urgent than ever that we act now to protect this diversity before it really is too late,” he added.

The latest shipment will bring the number of seed varieties, stored in three underground alcoves at an optimum minus 18 degrees Celsius, to 1.05 million.

The seed bank has the capacity to hold up to 4.5 million samples.

Around two or three million samples “would be a good idea to make the future of the food of mankind even more secure,” Stefan Schmitz told AFP in the freezing cold of Longyearbyen.

Little betrays the huge size of this granary for humanity on the icy mountainside except for its distinctive entrance: two towering grey walls emerging from the bowels of earth, topped with mirrors and pieces of iron creating a reflection that glimmers in the darkness of the polar winter.

The seed store was launched in 2008 with financing from Norway with the aim of safeguarding biodiversity in the face of climate change, wars and other natural and man-made disasters, earning it the nickname “Doomsday vault”.

Its usefulness was spotlighted during Syria's civil war when researchers were able in 2015 to retrieve from the vault duplicates of grains lost in the destruction of Aleppo.

The countries and institutions that deposit seeds in the vault retain ownership over them and can retrieve them when necessary.

More than 5,000 species of plants are now stored in the Arctic Archipelago, a frozen landscape where almost nothing grows.

The vault has itself been hit by climate change.

In 2016, water seeped into its tunnel entrance when the permafrost that encases it began to melt as Arctic temperatures climbed unusually high.

Norway has since financed work to insulate the vault from further effects of a warming and wetter climate, which scientists say is happening twice as fast in the Arctic than the global average.

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The archipelago is located halfway between mainland Norway and the North Pole, in an Arctic region that has become a geopolitical and economic hotspot as the ice melts and relations grow ever frostier between Russia and the West.

For €300 million ($326 million), interested parties can acquire the remote Sore Fagerfjord property in southwestern Svalbard.

Measuring 60 square kilometres (23 square miles) — about the size of Manhattan — the property is home to mountains, plains, a glacier and about five kilometres of coastline, but no infrastructure.

“It’s the last private land in Svalbard, and, to our knowledge, the last private land in the world’s High Arctic,” said lawyer Per Kyllingstad, who represents the sellers.

“The Chinese are naturally potential buyers since they’ve been showing a real interest in the Arctic and Svalbard for a long time,” he told AFP, adding that he had received “concrete signs of interest” from the country.

Special treaty

Since China’s 2018 white paper on the Arctic — a sign of its interest in the region — the country has defined itself a “near-Arctic state” and plans to play a growing role in the region.

Svalbard is governed by a 1920 international treaty that leaves ample room for foreign interests.

It recognises Norway’s sovereignty over Svalbard, but citizens of all signatories — including China — are equally entitled to exploit the region’s natural resources.

Russia, for example, has maintained a coal mining community on Svalbard, via the state-run company Trust Arktikugol, for decades.

But times have changed.

Keen to protect its sovereignty, Norway would not look kindly on the Sore Fagerfjord property falling into foreign hands.

Especially hands in China, which Norway’s intelligence services say poses the biggest security risk to the Scandinavian country after Russia.

Norway’s Attorney General has therefore ordered the owners — a company controlled by a Russian-born Norwegian, according to local media — to call off the planned sale.

“The land can’t be sold without the Norwegian authorities’ approval,” Trade and Industry Minister Cecilie Myrseth told AFP.

“Nor is it possible to hold negotiations about the property,” she added.

That argument is based on clauses of an old loan granted by the state in 1919. Kyllingstad insists the clauses’ statute of limitations has expired.