CRI听力:Vault Protects Seeds from Climate Change

Located on the Svalbard Islands in the Arctic, the Global Seed Vault is home to millions of seeds.

The facility is surrounded by permafrost and is naturally cooled to around -3 degrees Celsius.

And the main vault is cooled even further to -18 degrees Celsius to guarantee that crops preserved here can survive for hundreds of years.

Michael Koch with the Global Crop Diversity Trust pays a rare visit to the facility.

"Here you have world agriculture in one room. 860,000 different types of accessions from more than 60 different institutions coming from virtually every country on earth."

The labels on the hundreds of boxes give an indication of where they come from: the rice gene back in the Philippines, seeds from dry areas from ICARDA and maize from Mexico.

And new shipments are arriving all the time.

Cross-breeding allows scientists in gene banks to select specific traits and develop new climate-resilient crops as the need arises.

Koch says the vault plays a constructive role in cross-breeding so as to maintain crop diversity:

"You don't know what you're going need 20, 30, 50 years from now. Here you have the options for creating these better crops by using this diversity."

Meanwhile, the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization plays a key role in defending crop diversity and food security.

Shakeel Bhatti, FAO Secretary at the International Treaty on plant genetic resources for food and agriculture, says the genetic heritage preserved in the vault will help to diversify crops:

"To produce climate-smart food crops, we will need to draw upon the genetic variability and the genetic traits that are conserved in the genetic variations and diversity of seeds that are now presently stored in seed banks, but also increasingly now in the Global Seed Vault in Svalbard."

Seeds preserved in the vault are duplicates. In other words, they are back-ups in case gene banks fail.

And the vault has already proven its worth.

In September, precious seeds that were originally bred in war-stricken Syria were dispatched to Morocco and Lebanon to be duplicated to reconstitute stocks.

For CRI, I'm Victor Ning.