At the moment that Svalbard entered into its three-month-long polar night, when darkness lasts 24 hours a day, the freeze began at a new vault housing 4.5 million seed samples from around the world.
Loss of biological diversity is one of the biggest environmental challenges to be overcome if the world is to achieve sustainable development. The diversity of food plants is under particular pressure. The consequence could be an irreversible loss of our ability to cultivate food plants in the wake of to climatic changes, new plant diseases and the needs of a growing population
By securing the genetic diversity of the worlds food plants for future generations, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault makes an important contribution to the struggle against hunger and poverty in developing countries. Those countries are home to a large part of the worlds plant species, but they are also the centre of food security and agricultural development worries.
In Norway we have now done something to address the problem. The seed vault, established in the permafrost of Svalbard, is designed to store duplicate seed samples from collections around the world. Many of these collections are found in developing countries. If seeds are lost there as a result of natural catastrophe, war or some other cause, the collections will be replenished with seeds from Svalbard.
Creating a seed vault is a novel way of approaching environmental protection. One of the Norwegian goals are to pursue innovation in defence of the natural environment, which after all has provided the foundation for our way of life. Future generations deserve to inherit a robust environment.
The vault opened officially on 26 Feb. 2007. The Rome-based Global Diversity Trust and the Nordic Genetic Resource Centre are important partners in the project, which is financed in its entirety by the Norwegian government.