English Transcript

Last Updated 04/03/2008 14:01:00

World scientists have gathered in Norway, to officially inaugurate the United Nations backed Global Seed Vault The seed vault is designed as a defence against any future global catastrophe such as climate change or a nuclear holocaust Already, there are those who say the vault's doors may re-open in just a few years to deal with the effects of global warming

Presenter - Rafael Epstein Speaker - Cary Fowler, director of the Global Seed Vault Trust

RAFAEL EPSTEIN: On a group of islands 1,000 kilometres to the north of Norway is the town of Longyearbyen, the world's northern most town At this time of year, it has just a few hours of sunlight each day

It's where 45-million batches of seeds will be kept inside the long trident-shaped tunnel

All of it bored into the sandstone and limestone at a cost of $96-million

Cary Fowler is the director of the Global Seed Vault Trust, the man who pushed the UN and Norway to go ahead with the project and he's just come back from a visit to the vault

CARY FOWLER: (laughs) Oh my gosh, well it's really cold out there right now It's probably about minus ten or so outside And the wind is blowing hard so the snow is going horizontal at the moment

RAFAEL EPSTEIN: And the landscape?

CARY FOWLER: The landscape is quite mountainous The vault is built in straight into the side of one the mountains, about halfway up

And the vault is sort of a long tunnel that goes about 130 metres through solid rock to the coldest part of the mountain, where there is permafrost That means that's permanently below freezing, everyday of the year

And back in there there's three vault rooms that we have built It's sort of a cavern in a way, about 30 metres by ten metres by five metres high or so And book shelves essentially in these vault rooms

RAFAEL EPSTEIN: This sounds like something out of a science fiction movie You know, preserving seeds in case some sort of apocalypse comes

Is this preparation for something only like climate change or for other potential disasters as well?

CARY FOWLER: It can be preparation for just about any kind of disaster, but we really very much have in mind that we are preparing agriculture to deal with climate change, which we think is coming sooner rather than later

And?

RAFAEL EPSTEIN: Well how is the vault going to help agriculture adapt?

CARY FOWLER: The means for adaptation for our crops to new climates is the diversity that those crops already have We're going to need plant breeders to fashion new varieties for completely new environments and climates

They can't fashion those new varieties out of thin air, they've got to use the tools at hand And that's the crop diversity that we're going to protect and guard against extinction, up here in Svalbard

RAFAEL EPSTEIN: So can you give me a possible scenario of a way the vault might be used, say 20 years from now or 50 years from now?

CARY FOWLER: Well I tell you what, I think it's going to be used in the next couple of years, because there are times when entire seed collections or national collections get destroyed - Iraq, Afghanistan, Solomon Islands, Burundi Those national collections were completely destroyed in war situations recently

But I think we're losing crop diversity every single day just through mismanagement and accidents and equipment failures and bad funding

So I would expect that once we close the doors on this seed vault two days from now, we'll actually be reopening them in the next couple of years simply to take out and restore varieties that seed banks, even the best seed banks in the world have lost accidentally