How the world can work together when it wants to: the Svalbard Global Seed Vault
The Svalbard Global Seed Vault is a secure seedbank on the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen near Longyearbyen in the remote Arctic Svalbard archipelago, about 1,300 kilometres (810 miles) from the North Pole.
The purpose of the vault to preserve a wide variety of plant seeds that are duplicate samples, or “spare” copies, of seeds held in gene banks worldwide.The seed vault is an attempt to insure against the loss of seeds in other genebanks during large-scale regional or global crises.
The number of varieties of plant seeds now stored in the vault is around 400,000 and the total number of seeds in storage is over 20 million. The vault contains samples from approximately one-third of the world’s most important food crop varieties.
You can learn more about the vault here.