So what is the Svalbard Global Seed Vault? It's a secure facility located on the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen in the remote arctic Svalbard archipelago. A vault dug 120m into a sandstone mountain, 130m above sea level, and 1,300km from the north pole. Seed that's stored within the facility is kept at -18 Degree C by generators running at the site, should a catastrophe occur where power is lost, it would take several weeks for the vaults temperature to rise up to the chilly -3 degree C of the surrounding sandstone rock.

The purpose of the vault is to be a back up store for the worlds seed vaults. Seed vaults around the world can run the risk of losses through natural disasters, lack of funding or local political unrest, so seed vaults around the world have been sending some of their supplies to Norway. Now in the event of any disasters at any of these local seed banks, seed collections can be reestablished using the seed stored at Svalbard.

The Seed Vault is an answer to a call from the international community to provide the best possible assurance of safety for the world’s crop diversity, and in fact the idea for such a facility dates back to the 1980s. However, it was only with the coming into force of the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture, and with it an agreed international legal framework for conserving and accessing crop diversity, that the Vault became a practical possibility.

genetic diversity within different food crops - Courtesy Crop Diversity Trust

The Trust is currently supporting more than 100 institutes worldwide to regenerate unique accessions and deposit a safety duplicate sample in the Vault. The project is also financing the deposit of samples from the international collections of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR). To date 313,680 total seed samples have been deposited with Trust support.

The construction cost for the Seed Vault was approximately 48 million Norwegian Kroner or 9 million US. The cost was funded entirely by the Kingdom of Norway. The Global Crop Diversity Trust is supporting the operations of the Seed Vault by providing $125,000 to $150,000 annually. Norway will also provide funding for the ongoing maintenance of the Seed Vault, at a cost of approximately $100,000 a year.