The ‘doomsday' seed vault in Svalbard just added thousands of climate-hardy crops
Three times a year, a fortress within the remote mountainside of a Norwegian island opens its doors to a select few. Such infrequency is intentional. The Svalbard Global Seed Vault preserves more than 1.3 million samples in what is the world's most secure stash of seeds. Far above the Arctic Circle, tucked away in the permafrost, this underground 'doomsday' facility is built to outlast everything from climate disasters to civil wars.
The first vault opening of the year came Tuesday, when government officials and scientists, traveling great distances from countries like Brazil, Malawi, and the Philippines gathered to make a deposit. Their contribution of 14,022 samples from 21 gene banks around the world added to what is already the planet's largest collection dedicated to long-term seed storage. Organizers say Svalbard's growing stockpile, which includes traditional crops such as millet and drought-tolerant legumes, known colloquially as 'opportunity crops,' will ensure future farmers have what they need to adapt to an increasingly unpredictable climate.
Even as the Trump administration slashes support for climate-related research and guts the U.S. Agency for International Development and Department of Agriculture, safeguarding crop diversity remains a priority for much of the international community.
This deposit is 'about more than storing seeds,' said Stefan Schmitz, executive director of Crop Trust, the nonprofit organization that helps manage the vault alongside the Norwegian government and the Nordic Genetic Resource Center. 'It's about defusing a ticking time bomb that threatens our global food system … protecting crop diversity is a global imperative. We must defend and preserve these genetic resources to prevent our fragile world from becoming even more unstable.' He told Grist that now is the time for 'decision-makers around the world to recognize the urgency and take action together to secure the future of food.'
The latest additions include sorghum and pearl millet shipped from Sudan's crop gene bank, nearly destroyed during the country's civil war. The delegation from Malawi, where a barrage of extreme weather events have throttled subsistence farmers and deepened a hunger crisis, provided 'velvet beans,' a nitrogen-fixing legume that acts as a natural fertilizer. Staple varieties of rice, beans and maize came from Brazil, where such crops are seeing major yield losses. And the Philippines deposited sorghum, eggplant, and lima beans from a gene bank already ravaged by typhoons.
'In the face of climate change, which we are already feeling with all the extreme weather conditions in the Philippines, it becomes more pressing to duplicate these collections in other gene banks like Svalbard to safeguard [them],' Hidelisa de Chavez, a researcher at the University of the Philippines' National Plant Genetic Resources Laboratory, or NPGRL, told Grist.
For 16 straight years, the Philippines has ranked highest on the World Risk Index, which measures countries' vulnerability to extreme weather. In 2006, Typhoon Xangsane flooded the laboratory's main research building in Los Baños, almost wiping out the collection, said de Chavez: 'The whole gene bank was submerged in mud and water.' The damage and subsequent loss of power caused the 'irreversible' loss of several traditional varieties of crops, with some 70 percent of the collection ruined.
The NPGRL has sent roughly 1,000 genetic samples of crops to Svalbard as part of an initiative led by Crop Trust to help 'future-proof the world's food supply.' Ahead of Tuesday's deposit, de Chavez's team prepared a selection of sorghum, lima beans, eggplant and rice beans. Each is woven into the livelihoods and food culture of Indigenous and rural communities across the Philippines.
Even so, the lab is not contributing about half as many samples as it would like to because climate change is making it harder to grow what it would like to preserve. This trip saw de Chavez deposit just 75, as compared to 983 last year.
Haunted by the lingering ghosts of one disastrous typhoon and the looming specters of those to come, every storm season sees de Chavez increasingly fearful for the vulnerable crops she works to preserve. It gives her peace of mind to know samples of Filipino food staples now sit in an underground safe near the North Pole. Though the vault faces escalating risks and speculation over its ability to withstand the wrath of a warming planet, she still thinks the seeds stored at Svalbard have a much greater shot at prevailing there than anywhere else on Earth.
'Given climate change and the extreme weather conditions, we cannot say that these crops will still be available for future generations, so we have to continue conserving,' said de Chavez. 'If this disappears in the field, what would be our alternative, if we don't have it conserved? We cannot go back.'
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The 'doomsday' seed vault in Svalbard just added thousands of climate-hardy crops on Feb 26, 2025.
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