The Svalbard vault, known for its forbidding modern design, is a kind of seed ark, designed to protect Earth’s biodiversity in case of Armageddon seeds are not supposed to leave it unless something goes very, very wrong. ICARDA had been keeping backup copies of its seeds in the global “doomsday” seed vault in Svalbard, Norway, since 2008. In 2012, the Syrian civil war, and the prolonged drought that exacerbated it, forced ICARDA to undertake a desperate, chaotic move to Lebanon the organization’s researchers scrambled to save their own lives and preserve decades of work. In a recent article, published in Nature, ICARDA’s scientists note, dryly, that gene banks are “also vulnerable to natural and human-caused disasters.” The organization was originally situated in Aleppo.

But, as climate change has accelerated, ICARDA’s seeds have proved useful to plant breeders working on large-scale farms in wealthy countries. The goal of this work was to help the world’s poorest farmers. He is an expert in pulses-the family of grain that includes chickpeas and lentils-and together with his colleagues, who focus on legumes, cereals, viruses, and pests, he has used untamed versions of domesticated crops to breed varieties capable of withstanding harsh and changing conditions. Over three decades, Shehadeh had collected most of the original seeds himself, hiking through grasslands and forest. ICARDA houses more than a hundred and forty thousand accessions, or samples of seeds and other genetically significant plant material. “The system isn’t recognizing the abbreviation.” Eventually, he found the right code: the International Organization for Standardization uses the abbreviation “XK,” because Kosovo is a partially recognized state. “There is a problem with the abbreviation of Kosovo,” he said to himself, peering at the screen.

Ali Shehadeh, a sixty-six-year-old Syrian plant conservationist, was sitting in a nearby office, entering data about the seeds’ country of origin into his computer. The sound was like waves receding on a rocky beach. When I first visited, on an autumn afternoon in 2019, staff members in the main building were counting, weighing, and sliding seeds into small packets. Its facilities, surrounded by fields of experimental grain, include a laboratory, nurseries, and a gene bank-a storage facility in which tens of thousands of seeds have been carefully saved and catalogued.

The center was was awarded the Gregor Mendel Innovation Prize earlier this year for quickly responding to the fighting in Syria and successfully duplicating almost their entire collection.ĭesigned to conserve what it describes as “one of the most important natural resources on earth,” the Global Seed Vault has the capacity to store 4.5 million samples and currently holds more than 860,000 samples from crops found in almost every country-making it the most diverse collection of food crops in the world. The location of the vault means it’s not easily accessible, the permafrost ensures the seed samples will remain frozen even without power, and its above sea level so it’s not vulnerable to flooding.The International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas, known as ICARDA, is housed in a cluster of small buildings on a dusty property in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley, halfway between Beirut and Damascus. ICARDA researchers had previously deposited 80% of their collection into the Global Seed Vault and now want to withdraw nearly 130 out of 325 sample boxes, according to Reuters. The samples will be sent to ICARDIA’s new headquarters once all the paperwork is completed. Researchers from ICARDA had to move their headquarters from Aleppo in Syria to Beirut in Lebanon in 2012 as a result of the Syrian conflict. The International Center for Agricultural Research in Dry Areas (ICARDA) is one of 11 specialized seed banks tasked with preserving the biodiversity of the world’s crops.

When did syria get doomsday vault