Future on ice

BIO DIVERSITY:A 'doomsday vault' has been built inside the arctic circle to safeguard 4.5 miilion seed varieties in case of a disaster

A new Noah's Ark is nearing completion on a freezing mountainside inside the Arctic Circle. This vessel may one day save the world but it won't be carrying animals. It will be packed to the gunwales with seeds.

An international consortium hosted and co-funded by the Norwegian government has come together to build a repository where upwards of 4.5 million seed varieties will be stored for safekeeping. Given that it has been built to survive the equivalent of a nuclear explosion, the facility has been dubbed the "Doomsday Vault".

The Svalbard Global Seed Vault project was launched by the Norwegian Minister of Agriculture and Food Terje Riis-Johansen in late May 2006. Once the "cooling down" process - that will leave the vault at a nippy minus 18 degrees (0 degrees F) - is complete the vault will be ready to bring in its first seed samples at the end of next month.

"The vault is a secure storage facility for seeds which are already stored in different seed repositories around the world," explains project manager Grethe Helene Evjen of Norway's agriculture ministry. It will serve as a failsafe "backup" should other banks holding seed collections suffer damage from storms, disease or war.

Partners in the €50 million venture include the Norwegian government, the Rome-based Global Crop diversity Trust and the Nordic Gene Bank. But really the vault will serve as a world facility where the earth's bounty, its remarkable biodiversity, will be vouchsafed into a future made uncertain by global warming and the constant threat of conflict.

The vault sits at the end of a 120 metre tunnel blasted and bored through solid stone into the heart of a mountainside near the town of Longyearbyen on the island of Spitsbergen. It is part of the Svalbard archipelago lying almost 1,000 km north of mainland Norway and well within the Arctic Circle.

Longyearbyen is just entering month three of its three month "Polar Night" when there is 24 hours of complete darkness. It would be difficult to find a more remote and removed place for a doomsday repository of the world's crop seeds but of course that was the idea.

Seed banks of this kind are all about biodiversity, protecting important food crops of course but also all the many "cousin" varieties that allow plant diversity. There are 100,000 different rice varieties for example, all with different characteristics, qualities, weaknesses and benefits.

These characteristics in turn are inexorably linked to the variety's genetic make-up, its DNA. While you would recognise a crop as rice, each type has its own specific mix of genes and in some cases the genes are unique. Lose one variety through extinction or lack of cultivation and you have lost that gene mix forever. The genes can never be called back.

For this reason governments around the world have brought in legislation to protect biodiversity. The EU has a raft of directives requiring member states to protect flora and fauna diversity for posterity, explains Dermot McKinney who manages the NGO charity, Irish Seedsavers. "All of the directives are attempting to halt the loss of biodiversity," he explains.

In effect this means protecting against the loss of genes and for this reason seed banks are also often described as gene banks. And not all gene banks are able to protect their collections, says Evjen.

Last year a violent typhoon struck the Philippines and destroyed a national seed bank. Others have been destroyed by war in Afghanistan and Iraq. "Seeds are lost in gene banks and gene banks have been destroyed by catastrophes and war. That is why a number of people were thinking about where to have a backup storage facility for seeds," she says.

The Nordic Gene Bank already had its collection tucked away in a disused coal mine on Spitsbergen and so it was agreed to build the new vault under Spitsbergen's permafrost.

"We will have room for 4.5 million different types of seeds, although we believe there are more than 1.5 million different seeds stored in existing seed banks," says Evjen. The call has also gone out for seed banks around the world to send samples to the new vault when it opens. It has also launched a "seed portal" which will encourage national seed banks to make deposits and also provide information about the stored samples. This will be open to public access so people will be able to see what is stored.

The organisers are quick to point out that the vault, with its blast-proof steel doors, is not a "time capsule" where seeds will rest in perpetuity. Rather it will work like a bank open for deposits and withdrawals, with seeds remaining there for a time until replaced with fresh seed sent up by the original contributor, likely done at a time when they renew their own seed stocks.

Irish Seedsavers' McKinney supports the project but also recognises its limitations. The group maintains freezers that hold up to 600 vegetable seed varieties, but it replenishes supplies with fresh, fully viable seed every three to five years.

"The only way to protect diversity is to get out there and grow it," he argues. "When I was a kid everybody had a piece of land for growing vegetables. It would be good if we got back to that. The vault is a good idea but a better idea is for more people to be planting seeds."

The permafrost on Spitsbergen keeps the vault at a permanent minus 5 degrees (minus 23 degrees Farenheit) but that isn't quite cold enough. The Norwegians are using a large cooling unit that will freeze the vault and the surrounding rock to a distance of about 10 metres all round to minus 18 degrees.

At minus 18 degrees the seeds could be kept safe for centuries depending on species, says Global Crop Diversity Trust executive director, Cary Fowler.

"At these temperatures seeds for important crops like wheat, barley and peas can last for up to 10,000 years."

This however is not the intention and the vault will also replenish its seed supplies with timely contributions from the other gene banks. In practice the Norwegians expect seeds to remain in the vaults for between 20 and 100 years before replacements are sent.

The Government here backs the Svalbard initiative and has already received an invitation to make seeds available to it.

The Department of the Environment Heritage and Local Government polices commitments made under the international Convention on Biological Diversity and the Department of Agriculture, Food and Fisheries holds seed stocks for various plants including grasses, clovers and cereals. It is now considering which seeds might be appropriate for storage in the Svalbard vault.

The practical Norwegians have created a gene bank that could be walked away from and still provide a secure repository. Even if power to the cooling units failed, temperatures would still remain "comfortably" below freezing for centuries without intervention.

"We are trying to make an organisation that will last for as long as we can plan into the future," says Evjen.

"It is difficult to make something that is totally safe but the location is very safe and we think if the seeds are destroyed in other places around the world they will be backed up at Svalbard."

FURTHER READING ONLINE

See seedvault.no for information on the vault, croptrust.org for information about the Trust's activities and irishseedsavers.ie for details of its efforts to protect heritage crop varieties.