<
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-arctic-seed-vault-shows-the-flawed-logic-of-climate-adaptation/>
"At a latitude of 78 degrees north lies the northernmost city in the world. It
is an odd place. Way above the Arctic Circle—a mere 814 miles from the North
Pole—Longyearbyen, in Norway’s Svalbard archipelago, is home to only 2,400
people but more than 1.3 million seeds.
The Svalbard Global Seed Vault is an underground storage facility designed to
secure seeds to “ensure that food crop varieties are not lost” in the event of
a global crisis such as war, terrorism or climate change. Touted as “our
insurance policy that we’re going to be able to feed the world in 50 years,”
the vault has been situated at a location and depth in the Arctic intended to
ensure that the seeds will not rot or sprout and will be available for use when
needed. For further safety, the vault is refrigerated to zero degrees
Fahrenheit and designed to withstand a magnitude 10 earthquake. (For
comparison, the quake that produced the tsunami that devastated Fukushima,
Japan, was magnitude 9.) On the surface, the seed repository sounds like a
very solid idea. But it rests on shaky foundations.
The vault opened in 2008, following on an earlier iteration in which seeds were
stored in a nearby coal mine. It is not specifically a response to the threat
of climate change, but it is an epitome of climate-adaptation thinking. The
logic behind it goes like this: Climate change is underway, and our political
systems seem to be incapable of meaningful action to stop it, so we have little
choice but to plan for a future when we will face serious climate disruption.
Chief among the disturbances will be disruptions to the food supply as
punishing droughts and heat waves lead to widespread seasonal crop failures and
important individual food species become impossible to grow in the places where
people are used to growing them. When that happens, a supply of diverse
seeds—including some adapted to hotter, harsher climates—may be just the thing
we need to protect our food systems and stave off disaster.
It’s good to be realistic about the climate future we are facing, but the seed
vault embeds a conceit common to many adaptation plans: we know what we are
facing, so if we plan well, things will go well. But already chinks in the
vault’s armor have appeared. In 2017 the vault suffered a flood caused,
ironically, by climate change. A very warm (but increasingly not exceptional)
winter combined with heavy spring rain to thaw part of the surrounding
permafrost, flooding the entrance and threatening the safety of the seeds.
Changes have been made to the vault’s entrance to lessen this particular risk,
but the breach—less than a decade after the vault opened—shows that we humans
are not very good at anticipating change, even in the short run."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
