The International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA)聽requested that crop seeds from a backup vault in Norway be transported to聽its headquarters in Beirut, Lebanon, . The聽ICARDA requested the聽seed varieties to replace those lost from its聽previous headquarters in Aleppo, Syria, during the country鈥檚 civil war. The transfer is the first withdrawal聽in history from the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, published by its governing organization, the Global Crop Diversity Trust.
First opened in 2008, the聽Svalbard聽vault was designed to protect the greatest possible variety of seeds for crops that are crucial for human survival.聽The vault has safeguards to protect it from聽rising sea levels and power聽loss and the capability to remain sealed and frozen聽in the event of a disaster聽for a minimum of聽200 years.
鈥淚f something were to happen to one of those collections around the world, they can always come back to the seed vault and retrieve what might have been lost,鈥 Brian Lainoff, a spokesperson聽for the Crop Trust, said in the release.
Installed into the side of a mountain 800 miles from the North Pole, the underground Norwegian vault functions as a last-resort seed bank for about 860,000 seed samples from almost every nation on earth. The ICARDA requested 130 boxes, containing a total of 116,000 samples of seeds,聽of the 325 boxes it stores in the vault, according to Reuters.
鈥淧rotecting the world鈥檚 biodiversity in this manner is precisely the purpose of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault,鈥澛燣ainoff told Reuters.