by anthropocenic

Svalbard Global Seed Vault – protecting plant diversity for the future. The ultimate “insurance policy”. It is run like a bank, in that people around the world send their deposits (samples of seed strains they don’t want to lose) to the vault, and rent out a box that preserves them in case the strain is lost locally. Then they can take out the samples to re-establish that plant.

It is not, as many have originally thought, set up in case of worldwide catastrophe to “replenish the world”, but rather meant more to allow farmers to have a back up of “their” seeds – nobody else has access to a particular box except the one who sent it in. The vault itself doesn’t own the seeds, the depositors do. So it would seem it is set up to stop biodiversity loss one by one.

One could imagine, though, that if there were a catastrophe that wiped many things out, that whoever had access to the vault might change the rules, and others might support that. Currently it is owned by the Global Crop Diversity Trust of Denmark.

The question is, who will own the vault in hundreds or thousands of years? Who will have access? If something happens to them, is there any way to break into the vault?

http://www.croptrust.org/content/svalbard-global-seed-vault

http://www.survival-spot.com/survival-blog/svalbard-global-seed-vault/