The world used to cultivate over 6,000 different plants but UN experts say we now get about 40% of our calories from three main crops - maize, wheat and rice - making food supplies vulnerable if climate change causes harvests to fail. Located in the Arctic, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault is known as the 'doomsday' vault, as it serves to safeguard the worlds food supplies by storing seeds for plants and crops in the event of a. The vault, which holds over 1.1 million seed samples of nearly 6,000 plant species from 89 seed banks globally, also serves as a backup for plant breeders to develop new crop varieties. "The fact that the seed collection destroyed in Syria during the civil war has been systematically rebuilt shows that the vault functions as an insurance for current and future food supply and for local food security," said Norwegian International Development Minister Anne Beathe Tvinnereim. ICARDA made the first seed withdrawal from the vault in 2015 to replace a collection damaged by the war, and two further withdrawals in 20 to rebuild its own collections, now held in Lebanon and Morocco. Syrias civil war has prompted the first withdrawal of crop seeds from a 'doomsday' vault built in an Arctic mountainside to safeguard global food supplies. The International Center for Agricultural Research in Dry Areas (ICARDA), which moved its headquarters to Beirut from Aleppo in 2012 because of the war in Syria, will deposit some 8,000 samples. On Monday, gene banks from Sudan, Uganda, New Zealand, Germany and Lebanon will deposit seeds, including millet, sorghum and wheat, as back-ups to their own collections. The Svalbard Global Seed Vault, on Spitsbergen island halfway between mainland Norway and the North Pole, is only opened a few times a year to limit its seed banks' exposure to the outside world. experts say we now get about 40% of our calories from three main crops - maize, wheat and rice - making food supplies vulnerable if climate change causes harvests to fail.A vault built on an Arctic mountainside to preserve the world's crop seeds from war, disease and other catastrophes will receive new deposits on Monday, including one from the first organisation that made a withdrawal from the facility. The world used to cultivate over 6,000 different plants but U.N. On Octothe International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA) received the first ever withdrawal of seeds from the Doomsday Vault. ICARDA made the first seed withdrawal from the vault in 2015 to replace a collection damaged by the war, and two further withdrawals in 20 to rebuild its own collections, now held in Lebanon and Morocco. That accounts for 130 of the 325 boxes that the center had previously given to the vault. The International Center for Agricultural Research in Dry Areas (ICARDA), which moved its headquarters to Beirut from Aleppo in 2012 because of the war in Syria, will deposit some 8,000 samples. Out of the 860,000-plus samples the vault houses from all over the world, ICARDA wants 116,000 of those. (AP Photo/Hakon Mosvold Larsen/Scanpix Norway, File) View 8 more images (Newser) The 'Doomsday Vault' just got its first bit of doomsday press: coverage of its first-ever withdrawal of seeds. The Svalbard Global Seed Vault, on Spitsbergen island halfway between mainland Norway and the North Pole, is only opened a few times a year to limit its seed banks' exposure to the outside world. 18, 2015, a view of the Global Seed Vault in Svalbard, Norway. A vault built on an Arctic mountainside to preserve the world's crop seeds from war, disease and other catastrophes will receive new deposits on Monday, including one from the first organisation that made a withdrawal from the facility.
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