Svalbard Global Seed Vault

The facility serves a humanitarian purpose and is part of the international system for conserving plant genetic diversity guided by the UN organization for Food and Agriculture (FAO). The idea of having a global security storage facility in Svalbard, to house duplicates of seed conserved in gene banks all over the world began being discussed in the 1980s. In 1984, the Nordic Gene Bank (now NordGen) established a backup seed storage facility in an abandoned coal mine outside Longyearbyen, and the idea of establishing worldwide backup storage gradually evolved. Visit the Website for more info.