A vault built on an Arctic mountainside to preserve the world’s crop seeds from catastrophes will receive new deposits, including one from the first organisation that made a withdrawal from the facility.
Highlights
- Svalbard facility is global back-up for seed banks designed to safeguard biodiversity of crops.
- Facility is on Spitsbergen island halfway between mainland Norway and the North Pole.
- On Monday, gene banks from Sudan, Uganda, New Zealand, Germany and Lebanon will deposit seeds.
- The International Center for Agricultural Research in Dry Areas (ICARDA), which moved its headquarters to Beirut from Aleppo in 2012 because of the war in Syria, will deposit some 8,000 samples.
- The vault, which holds over 1.1 million seed samples of nearly 6,000 plant species from 89 seed banks globally, also serves as a backup for plant breeders to develop new crop varieties.