CLIMATE change is in the news this week, with the withdrawal of the US from the Paris climate agreement.
Less publicised, but concerning to eagle eyed Australian farmers were reports that melting permafrost had caused damage to the iconic Svalbard Seed Vault.
Thankfully, Tim Fischer, vice chair of the Crop Trust, the organisation that runs the Svalbard Seed Vault, said the reports were wrong.
“There is no emergency at Svalbard,” he said.
Svalbard, in northern Norway, was viewed as an ideal place to store important seeds safely in the case of a world catastrophe, with the vault buried in the side of an ice mountain.
However, even the snowy realms of northern Norway, the inspiration for the children’s movie ‘Frozen’, is not immune to the march of climate change and there has been some melting of the permafrost.
Mr Fischer said this had occurred before and was manageable.
“There has been zero damage as a result of the melt, so all 11,000 Australian seed packets are fine.”
“When water intrudes into the outer part of the seed vault, as it does from time to time, it is immediately removed again by pumps that work around the clock,” he said.
“The vault has several backup systems and internal doors, remedial work near the entry portal has been carried out after record warm winter temperatures caused a melt in the area permafrost,” he said.
The vault is owned and administered for the Crop Trust by the Norwegian Government.
Mr Fischer added the Seed Vault and Crop Trust are non-commercial ‘for public good’ operations with many programs in addition to the vault, including collecting crop wild relatives like wild rice and grass peas to improve varieties to combat climate change.
“With global warming, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault has the golden grain keys to the future of world agriculture,” said Mr Fischer.
He noted one example of a cassava seed collected at random a few years ago in Colombia has been used to solve a cassava disease problem in Thailand.