The Arctic Seed Vault Shows the Flawed Logic of Climate Adaptation

The Arctic Seed Vault Shows the Flawed Logic of Climate Adaptation

By Naomi Oreskes

At a latitude of 78 degrees north lies the northernmost city in the world. It is an odd place. Way above the Arctic Circle—a mere 814 miles from the North Pole—Longyearbyen, in Norway’s Svalbard archipelago, is home to only 2,400 people but more than 1.3 million seeds.

The Svalbard Global Seed Vault is an underground storage facility designed to secure seeds to “ensure that food crop varieties are not lost” in the event of a global crisis such as war, terrorism or climate change. Touted as “our insurance policy that we’re going to be able to feed the world in 50 years,” the vault has been situated at a location and depth in the Arctic intended to ensure that the seeds will not rot or sprout and will be available for use when needed. For further safety, the vault is refrigerated to zero de­­grees Fahrenheit and designed to withstand a magnitude 10 earthquake. (For comparison, the quake that produced the tsunami that devastated Fukushima, Ja­­pan, was magnitude 9.) On the surface, the seed repository sounds like a very solid idea. But it rests on shaky foundations.

The vault opened in 2008, following on an earlier iteration in which seeds were stored in a nearby coal mine. It is not specifically a response to the threat of climate change, but it is an epitome of climate-­adaptation thinking. The logic behind it goes like this: Climate change is underway, and our political systems seem to be incapable of meaningful action to stop it, so we have little choice but to plan for a fu­ture when we will face serious climate disruption.

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Chief among the disturbances will be disruptions to the food supply as punishing droughts and heat waves lead to widespread seasonal crop failures and important individual food species become impossible to grow in the places where people are used to growing them. When that happens, a supply of diverse seeds—including some adapted to hotter, harsher climates—may be just the thing we need to protect our food systems and stave off disaster.

It’s good to be realistic about the climate future we are facing, but the seed vault embeds a conceit common to many adaptation plans: we know what we are facing, so if we plan well, things will go well. But already chinks in the vault’s armor have appeared. In 2017 the vault suffered a flood caused, ironically, by climate change. A very warm (but increasingly not exceptional) winter combined with heavy spring rain to thaw part of the surrounding permafrost, flooding the entrance and threatening the safety of the seeds. Changes have been made to the vault’s entrance to lessen this particular risk, but the breach—less than a decade after the vault opened—shows that we humans are not very good at anticipating change, even in the short run.

Boosters of the seed vault sustain the logic of their effort in part by effacing the embarrassment of the flood. The timeline of the vault on the website of the vault’s partner, CropTrust, does not mention it. When asked about the flood by a reporter for the Guardian, a representative of the Norwegian government, which owns and operates the vault, said: “It was not in our plans to think that the permafrost would not be there and that it would experience extreme weather like that … The question is whether this is just happening now, or will it escalate?”

You don’t have to be a climate scientist to know the Arctic is losing permafrost; in Svalbard, the dislocation is obvious even to an untrained eye. And it’s long been known that the Arctic would warm more rapidly than the rest of the globe: Princeton University geophysicist Syukuro Manabe predicted this effect—known as polar amplification—in the 1970s(he belatedly won a Nobel Prize in 2021 for this work).Today the Arctic is warming four times faster than the rest of the planet. Even if the en­­tire world were to stop burning fossil fuels now, global temperatures would not return to normal for decades or centuries to come. Given the state of action (or inaction) on climate, we don’t have to ask whether Arctic warming and permafrost loss will escalate. It is a near certainty.

That is not the only problem with the thinking behind the seed vault. Proponents describe it as a “safeguard against catastrophic starvation,” but there are reasons to doubt it would function that way. Scholars at the University of British Columbia noted that seeds isolated from the environment do not evolve, so if they are reintroduced decades from now, they may face a natural world to which they are no longer adapted. Because of this biological lag, Svalbard’s diligently protected seeds might turn out to be useless, unable to grow or survive.

The vault’s focus on seeds also neglects crucially important food crops such as cassava that are not typically propagated through seeds. And if we truly were threatened by global starvation, how likely is it that the seeds could be retrieved, distributed and sown and the crops reaped in time to feed the world?

The problem of biological lag could be addressed by regular updating of the stored seeds with new samples taken from nature, but that is expensive. Even without such updating, the expense of the vault—it cost €8.3 million to build, €20 million to upgrade and €1 million a year to maintain—makes one wonder if it is really a good use of conservation re­­sources and scientific effort. And then there is its carbon footprint. Maintaining the vault at its chilly –0.4 de­gree F re­­quires electricity from the public power plant in Longyearbyen, which runs on fossil fuel.

It’s smart to plan for the future. But the seed vault assumes that we know enough to plan effectively and that people will pay attention to what we know. History shows this is often not the case.

The difficulties of the seed vault re­­­­mind us that the most important thing we can do right now is not to plan to re­­spond to climate disaster after it happens but to do everything in our power to prevent it while we still have that chance.

This is an opinion and analysis article, and the views expressed by the author or authors are not necessarily those of Scientific American.