In May 2016, more than 8,000 varieties of crops -- including sheep’s food and chili peppers -- from Germany, Thailand, New Zealand, and the World Vegetable Center were deposited into the Svalbard Global Seed Vault.



Among other seed types, there are currently 200,000 varieties of rice and 125,000 varieties of wheat being protected at the vault.

“Ideally, we want to have a copy of each unique plant variety around the globe in Svalbard so if anything were to happen in any other seed bank around the globe, we could rest assured that we can still find the variety that we’re looking for and be able to use it for natural breeding for the plant that we need,” Haga said.

It’s an act of human intervention that is becoming more urgently needed as time goes on.

“It is just so much more important to have access to this material now than it was in the past because human intervention is challenging biological stability,” says Haga, adding people need to understand that “we have so severely impacted our natural environment that we have got to safeguard what we have.”