365 Days of Climate Awareness 277 – Climate Mitigation Strategies: The Global Seed Bank

As the Arctic warms disproportionately, the glaciers in the Svalbard archipelago melt and permafrost in Norway warms, Norway itself does not face the existential crisis which Pacific islands facing inundation or tropical countries with increasingly tenuous access to water do. Norway’s per capita carbon emissions are about 8 tons CO2, roughly half of the 16 T/person in the US. As in other respects of climate change mitigation, Norway has taken the lead in one aspect of preserving biodiversity: its seed bank.

Map of Svalbard (note Longyearbyen on the west coast of Spitsbergen).

Entrance to the Global Seed Bank, Longyearbyen, Spitsbergen.

The archipelago of Svalbard sits north of Norway’s mainland at the latitudes of roughly 76° to 81°N, and its main island is Spitsbergen. The climate of Svalbard is arctic tundra, and it is the location chosen for the Global Seed Vault, a project in conjunction with the United Nations aimed at preserving some of earth’s declining plant biodiversity. Norway owns the Seed Bank but manages it in cooperation with the Crop Trust based in Germany and the Nordic Genetic Resource Center

Annual CO₂ emissions, Norway.

Cumulative CO₂ emissions, Norway.

The vault is free to all depositors. It began taking deposits in 2008 and currently holds over one million samples. Spitsbergen was chosen for its geological stability, and its extreme cold, so that even if power at the facility fails, its temperature will stay below freezing for more than a century, even with modeled levels of global warming. The premise of the bank is to store seeds and small plant samples below freezing temperatures. It is not the only bank of its kind: there are more than 1750 globally, but its size and location make it something of the reserve for other banks in warmer, higher-risk locations.

Per capita CO₂ emissions, Norway.

A problem is that not all seeds are equally hardy to freezing. The storage process itself is selective, in that some species of plants have been found to respond poorly to long-term frozen storage. The effort itself to preserve biodiversity is not perfect, and in fact only slows the process of species loss, though plant biologists estimate that many disappearing species can be preserved for several hundred years this way, and the hardiest, several thousand.

Tomorrow:the Arctic Council.

Be brave, and be well.