Svalbard Global Seed Vault:
The Svalbard Global Seed Vault received more than 14,000 new seed samples.
- It is the largest backup facility for the world’s crop diversity.
- Svalbard is the Norwegian archipelago half way between the Northern pole and Mainland Norway.
- The Seed Vault’s objective is to safeguard as much of the world’s unique crop genetic material as possible while also avoiding unnecessary duplication.
- It offers free-of-charge, long-term storage of seed duplicates from international, national and regional gene banks and institutions.
- The ownership of the seeds remains with the depositing gene bank. In the Seed Vault they are stored under so called black box conditions, meaning that only the institution that deposited the seeds has access and is allowed to withdraw them.
- It was set deep inside a mountain to withstand disasters from nuclear war to global warming, in 2008 as a backup for the world’s gene banks that store the genetic code for thousands of plant species.
- It has the capacity to store 4.5 million varieties of crops.
- The facility serves a humanitarian purpose and is part of the international system for conserving plant genetic diversity guided by the UN organisation for Food and Agriculture (FAO).
