Palestinian seeds join Arctic ‘doomsday vault’

A “doomsday vault” in the Arctic designed to safeguard the world’s plant diversity has received a new deposit of thousands of seed samples, including Palestinian ones amid war and hunger in Gaza, it said on Wednesday.

Opened in 2008, the Global Seed Vault offers a safety net in case of natural catastrophe, war, climate change, disease or manmade disasters.

More than 30,000 samples from a record 23 organisations in 21 countries were deposited in the vault in Norway’s Svalbard archipelago on Tuesday, the Crop Trust, one of the project’s partners, said on Wednesday.

Buried inside a mountain near Longyearbyen on Spitsbergen Island, about 1,300 kilometres (about 800 miles) from the North Pole, the “Noah’s Ark” of food crops is also aimed at preserving plants that can feed a growing population facing climate change.

Launched in 2008 with funding from Norway, the three cold chambers are today home to some 1.3 million varieties of seeds that their owners can withdraw at any moment.

Among those deposited on Tuesday were 21 Palestinian species comprised of vegetables, millet and herbs, provided by the Palestinian non-profit Union of Agricultural Work Committees (UAWC).

According to the Crop Trust, a new delivery of seeds is expected in February from Sudan, a country also ravaged by war and famine.

“Climate change and conflict threaten infrastructure and impact food security for over 700 million people in more than 75 countries worldwide,” Crop Trust director Stefan Schmitz said.

“Genebanks are ramping up efforts to back-up seed collections, and we are proud to support them by providing a safe haven in Svalbard,” he said in a statement.

The vault is designed to be able to resist catastrophes, located far from conflict zones and placed at an altitude that will protect it from rising sea levels.

Even if the refrigeration system were to fail, the vault would maintain its cold temperature thanks to the permafrost around it.