Is the Global Seed Vault in Norway humanity’s last, best hope?

Tucked away on a remote island in Norway’s Svalbard archipelago, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault is ‘an insurance policy for world agriculture’. Cavernous and eerily stark on the inside, the vault contains hundreds of millions of frozen seed samples from across the globe. The US agriculturalist Cary Fowler, senior advisor to the Global Crop Diversity Trust, helps to oversee the project. He thinks that the vault could help humanity survive the incremental but very real challenges presented by climate change and other existential threats. Believing that ‘doomsday happens every day… in small bits and pieces’, Fowler views the long-term survival of our species as a problem that can be solved only by prudent thinking and ‘very quiet’ solutions.