A plant “Noah’s Ark”: Ukraine shelters seeds in a reserve in the Arctic

Ukraine, a major grain-producing nation, has deposited seed samples in the Svalbard World Reserve in the Norwegian Arctic for the first time since the start of the Russian invasion, the Norwegian government announced. Buried in tunnels drilled into a mountain, a little more than 1,000 kilometers from the North Pole, the Svalbard World Seed Reserve - its official name - is a sort of plant “Noah's Ark” which aims to protect biodiversity in the face of natural disasters, wars, climate change, diseases and the vagaries of man.

Ukraine deposited 773 seed samples there this week, including different varieties of sunflower, cereals, buckwheat and fodder plants, the Norwegian Ministry of Agriculture said in a statement published Wednesday evening. This is its first deposit in the Reserve since 2012, he said. Often referred to as the "breadbasket of Europe", Ukraine has a large genetic collection, with more than 154,000 samples representing some 2,000 species, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).

Its national gene bank, located in Kharkiv, in the east of the country, saw its buildings and infrastructure damaged by Russian bombings in 2022, before its collection was transferred to the West, far from the front, recalls the Norwegian Ministry of Agriculture. Inaugurated in 2008 with funding from Norway, the World Seed Vault is a set of three cold strong rooms which today houses, for preservation purposes, more than 1.4 million samples that their owners can withdraw at any time.

Far from conflict zones and located at an altitude that protects it from rising ocean levels, the Reserve is designed to withstand disasters, even in the event of failure of the refrigeration system thanks to its location under permafrost (ground frozen all year round). However, it has already suffered the effects of global warming: in 2016, water infiltrated its access tunnel, without reaching the seeds, subsequently requiring some 20 million euros of work to strengthen its watertightness.