Ukraine’s valuable seed bank is at risk of being lost to war

Concerns over the preservation of the Ukrainian underground seed bank vault were first sparked when the site was struck by Russian shelling in May.

According to Crop Trust, an organisation dedicated to conserving and preserving crop diversity for the future, only the seed bank’s research facility was partially damaged.

But after conflicting reports outlining total destruction of the vault started circulating online, Elly Barrett, a technical officer at the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation confirmed publicly that the national seed collection is safe and sound, but remains in a vulnerable position.

This is particularly worrying as Ukraine’s seedbank stores are the 10^th largest in the world, yet only 4 percent of the collection has been backed up or copied in other locations.

So what’s with the hype around seeds anyway? They might be overlooked (and spat out) day-to-day, but they’re pretty underrated considering that they’re the starting point of life for almost all plants we see and foods we eat.

In the event of a global catastrophe (natural or man-caused), seed banks could be a holy grail for any remaining survivors of the human population. Sure, I’m imagining worst case scenarios here, but seed banks will also prove vital for adapting to the effects of climate change.

Stefan Schmitz, the executive director of Crop Trust, described seed banks as ‘a kind of life insurance for mankind’ that will be vital to help us withstand new pests, diseases, droughts, and hotter temperatures. He continued, saying any destruction to Ukraine’s seed bank would be ‘a tragic loss.’

The good news is there are an estimated 1,700 seed banks situated around the world, including the mammoth Svalbard Global Seed Vault – otherwise known as the Doomsday Vault – located on the remote Norwegian island of Spitsbergen.

It’s here in the Arctic that the 4 percent of Ukraine’s unique collection of seed species is backed up, shelved alongside one million other species samples from around the world.

Still, researchers at Svalbard are hopeful they will increase their stock of Ukraine’s seeds to 10 percent over the next year, a humble but realistic number that reflects the difficulty of gathering and transporting seeds from a warzone.