Built in 1984, it only recently grew to become the vast sanctuary it is today recently. This concern drew international attention to the Svalbard Seed Vault. Word went around the world, raising concern as to the state of the seed preservation that was so desperately needed. Ī seed bank in the International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas, or ICARDA.

Most of the fat-tailed Awassi sheep, bred to produce more milk and require less water, were looted and eaten”. It did happen, when in 2014, “the fighting drew closer to its headquarters in Aleppo and its sprawling field station in nearby Tal Hadya. Indeed, an infamous seed bank in Syria called Icarda is still going on very limited resources as war unfolds around it, presenting concerns for the conservationist community as to what would happen if it was caught in the cross-fire. Fear also arose as similar programs in third world countries, where some seeds were the last samples of their kind, started being threatened by problems such as shortness of funding, drought, corruption, or sometimes surrounding war and violence.

These initiatives have a lot of worth and a lot to bring to their respective communities, but it became clearer and clearer over time that such a small scale could not tackle the biodiversity crisis that was so obviously on the way. They were government funded and government owned, like the Hawai’i Public Seed Initiative, which does not just conserve seeds, but “assists Hawaiian farmers by holding workshops to educate them about storing and improving their seed varieties”, or the New York City Plant Conservation Initiative, a program started by the City of New York in 2008: “launched with 34 endangered species, the initiative hopes to preserve New York City's biodiversity and generate awareness surrounding the conservation of urban plant varieties”. The concept being young and underdeveloped, most of these programs were formed into local programs of seed preservation.

These realizations shook conservationists worldwide, which led them to take actions in various ways, including the creation of seed banks and seed vaults. Over the past century, the measurements of species endangerment rates became too critical to ignore: in 2016, “One in five of the world’s plant species is threatened with extinction, according to the first global assessment of flora, putting supplies of food and medicines at risk”. The Svalbard Global Seed Vault was not created at random. These aspects shall be elaborated and assessed to examine the legitimacy and feasibility of such a herculean endeavor. However this project introduces questions of technical efficiency, biology and ethics. It is described as a global initiative to best all previous seed reserves through a complex network of international cooperation and funding. After the failure of multiple vaults around the world, this remote location was chosen to host a new type of vault. The initiative came from a century-old failing movement to protect seeds of plants with a declining or endangered population. The Vault itself was imagined and designed to contain and protect over 4.5 million seed samples from (more or less) any and all possible threats: war, natural disasters, ecological disaster, extinction… The location was not chosen solely for that reason, as Svalbard is described as “a working environment and perhaps more importantly represents the nexus of a global network of economic and political interests”. It was built in 1984 in a repurposed abandoned coal mine, which puts the major part of the vault deep in the side of one of the largest mountains on the island of Spitsbergen, “while the entrance might be visible, the Vault itself is over 100 meters into the mountain”. The Svalbard Global Seed Vault is a secure seed bank built on the Arctic Svalbard Archipelago in Norway, the furthermost north location habitable and reachable by commercial airplanes.

Inside doomsday vault