A Noah's Ark for seeds

Inside an icy cavern tunnelled into a frozen mountainside near the North Pole, a newly carved Noah's Ark is lying in wait, more than half empty.

The ark – officially the Svalbard Global Seed Vault – is designed to float humanity into the second half of this century if nations pay the pittance that experts say it will cost to shepherd critical varieties of endangered seeds on board.

The onslaught of global warming has already pushed tens of thousands of seed varieties into extinction. But food and climate scientists argue that rescuing and preserving seeds from the remaining 80,000 edible endangered crops is crucial to avoiding the massive disruptions forecast to cripple the world food system as early as the midpoint of this century.

“People, even the researchers developing the Toyota Prius, will need to eat,” says Cary Fowler, executive director of the Global Crop Diversity Trust, the Rome-based organization that has been a key backer of the seed ark, located 1,000 kilometres north of mainland Norway and often dubbed the “doomsday vault.”

“People make the assumption that agriculture will adapt to climate change,” he says. “But how do crops in the field adapt to climates that haven't been experienced since the Neolithic period? We might as well ask whether fish are going to adapt to playing the piano.”

Negotiations among leaders at the climate-change talks in Copenhagen are expected to focus mainly on establishing targets that will mitigate the effects of climate change. Adaptation-related measures – those aimed not at stalling climate change, but at enabling food production in drastically altered climate conditions – are not central on the agenda, but they ought to be, Mr. Fowler says.

For relatively minimal investments, he adds, nations could reap incredible payouts. “I know we can conserve all of the diversity of wheat – 200,000 strains – and conserve it forever, for a one-time price of a little more than $30-million,” he says. “All the world's wheat! You couldn't ever get an insurance policy for anything that valuable that would be that cheap.”

One-third of the world's seed varieties are already sealed in the chilled vault inside foil packages reminiscent of military ration packs. The goal of collecting and preserving a sample of them is to create a deep genetic pool with a diverse range of seed characteristics as broad as the globe. As climates change, scientists can dip into that pool for seeds with the specific genetic traits that conditions demand – hardiness, high yields or drought tolerance, for example – and fuse them together.

The techniques used to do that could be old (traditional breeding) or new (genetic modification). Both can ultimately produce super-varieties of crops designed to function in hotter, drier and less fertile environments.

But scientists who study the impact of climate change on crops warn the process will not happen naturally.

“Humankind cannot expect to successfully adapt to climate change without adapting agriculture, and we cannot adapt agriculture without retaining the genetic diversity needed to breed resilient crop varieties,” says Norman Looney, a Canadian scientist who is president of the Belgium-based International Society for Horticultural Science.

“We want policy-makers to appreciate this simple reality,” says Mr. Looney, one of 60 world-renowned agricultural experts who recently signed a petition imploring the leaders going to Copenhagen to acknowledge the unprecedented threat that climate change poses to global agriculture and the production of food.

Outside the research world, the topics of food and climate change are not typically married, but conceiving of them as separate problems is increasingly dangerous, experts say. They warn that failure to invest in agricultural adaptation to smooth the ongoing disruptions to the food cycle could starve swaths of the world's growing population, regardless of how much greenhouse-gas emissions are reduced.

“Agriculture is temperature- and water-sensitive. Temperature and water are the two things that climate change affects most,” says Margaret Catley-Carlson, another Canadian signatory to the petition who sits on the United Nations Secretary-General's Advisory Board on Water. “You cannot guarantee that wheat, barley, strawberry, tomatoes … that flourished at one temperature and one amount of moisture [are] going to stay alive, flourish and produce in two degrees of difference and a lot different rainfall.”

A worthy starting point, though, is investing in seed banks that will preserve crop diversity, experts say. While there are various seed banks scattered around the world, the massive Svalbard vault was created as a global resource.

Ultimately, it will house around 1.5 million specimens. About $250-million will be required to collect copies of the remaining seeds, but if countries elected to adopt various seeds and fund their collection as part of the climate-change commitments hammered out in Copenhagen, the tab would drop dramatically.

And financing what promises to be a food-supply insurance policy would also increase the likelihood that the other pledges world leaders are expected to make will be a success.

“It's a prerequisite for solving all the other problems,” Mr. Fowler says.

Jessica Leeder is The Globe and Mail's global food reporter.

BY THE NUMBERS

14%

Proportion of greenhouse gases that are agriculture-related

70%

Percentage of global fresh-water supply that agriculture requires

$5-million

Approximate cost of preserving copies of all lentil-seed varieties

$30-million

Amount needed to preserve copies of all existing rice varieties

20% to 40%

Amount major crop yields in Africa are expected to decline before 2050