PARIS / FRance, 21 July 2025: Deep within the Arctic permafrost, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault recently received a precious gift: 2,707 seed samples from ICARDA, including drought-resistant and wild varieties like faba bean, grasspea, wild lentil, vetch, and wild cicer. This “Doomsday Vault,” a global agricultural backup hailed for its security, has become an insurance capsule, safeguarding the genetic diversity essential for sustainable agriculture.
While modern agriculture often depends on a shrinking range of commercial crops, ICARDA’s contribution stands apart. The seeds—many sourced from the drylands of the Global South—offer genetic traits that enable survival against drought, pests, and poor soils. As agriculture wrestles with the realities of climate change, conflict, and supply chain disruptions, these resilient seeds may hold the keys to global food security and environmental resilience.
ICARDA, part of CGIAR, has learned firsthand the importance of backup. The 2014 Syrian conflict forced the evacuation of its main genebank, but prudent storage in Svalbard let the organization restore vital collections from backups, establishing regional hubs in Morocco and Lebanon. This strategic foresight reinforces ICARDA’s role at the intersection of food security, agrobiodiversity, and geopolitical stability.
The importance of vaults like Svalbard cannot be overstated. With more than 1.3 million diverse seed varieties from around the world, the facility acts as a final safeguard against the erosion of agricultural diversity, ensuring options remain for future crop breeding and adaptation efforts.
In a world where climate volatility is now the new normal, ICARDA’s Arctic deposit is both pragmatic and visionary, offering a decentralized global insurance policy measured not in megabytes but in millennia of evolutionary resilience. As policymakers and scientists look decades ahead, the hope is that these seeds will not just preserve history—but nourish the planet’s future.
Image credit: cgiar.org
