Should we be worried about the future of food production, especially when climate change, threats to environmental ecosystems, and future overpopulation prediction models give us cause for concern?
The Svalbard Global Seed Vault is the largest seed gene bank in the world located on the Norwegian Arctic Island of Spitsbergen. It can store nearly 4.5 million frozen agricultural, food crop seed samples and plant germplasm, originally located in an abandoned coal mine before tunneling deep inside the Arctic mountainside through virgin permafrost to create the optimal environment for the vault. Many international organizations and countries gift seed samples every year representing nearly 13,000 years of agricultural history. The vault can preserve most major food crop seeds for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. There are currently over 1 million samples in the vault. With such a feat of engineering, you would think the fortress should be safe.
The seed bank is 120 meters inside a sandstone fortress where seeds are carefully preserved from moisture. The island site has ideal conditions for preservation and security because it lacks tectonic activity and has permafrost, is refrigerated by local coal production that maintains optimal cooling and bedrock temperature, and being 130 meters above sea level, it will remain dry even if Arctic ice sheets melt. But recent events suggest otherwise, hence giving rise to climate anxiety and risks to future crop production.
The Vault’s mission is to safeguard against the loss of agricultural diversity in traditional gene banks and preserve our global food supply. As a “fail-safe” protection against the loss of one of our most important natural resources, the vault may be accessed when other world gene banks lose samples due to a variety of reasons including accidents, equipment failures, mismanagement, funding cuts, and natural disasters, such as flooding and fires, that occur with increased frequency. This may be exacerbated by countries besieged by war and civil strife, such as in the Middle East, where some seedbanks have perished entirely, and serve as backup storehouses for the nearly 2000 seedbanks worldwide, ensuring continued agricultural biodiversity.
Although the popular press has dubbed Svalbard as the “Doomsday Vault” in the event of major regional wars or global catastrophe, it is not an unfitting name given our planetary precariousness due to inexorable climate change, global warming, forecasts of nuclear war or human error, and food insecurity that has pervaded the planet, which has intensified since the global pandemic. As a harbinger that symbolizes the end of world hunger, it also symbolizes the need for a watershed sentinel to defend against The End.
And after a recent flooding of the tunnel leading to the vault due to permafrost melt and a 20-million-dollar upgrade later, will it be able to weather the heat from our warming world when those Arctic glaciers continue to melt? This is particularly worrisome given that for the first time since records began, the Laptev Sea has not frozen when expected, signaling how climate change has transformed the Arctic.
As our planet continues to roast and sea levels rise, environmental anxiety, uncertainty, and eco-pessimism are not uncommon psychological reactions. Calls for climate justice could not be more expeditious. And if we don’t annihilate one another with nuclear weapons, we can anticipate a world population of 10 billion people within the next two decades. Preserving and accessing the vault will be more needed than ever.
This post is adapted from End of the World: Civilization and Its Fate.
