Svalbard Global Seed Vault, GoPro Launch Fundraising Campaign

The Svalbard Global Seed Vault and GoPro launched a fundraising program Tuesday, money from which will go toward ensuring the conservation of Earth’s crop diversity. The initiative was started under GoPro’s corporate social responsibility program, GoPro for a Cause.

Managed by the Crop Trust, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault — on the remote Norwegian Arctic island of Spitsbergen, between mainland Norway and the North Pole — is home to the largest collection of agricultural biodiversity, and will soon have 930,821 seed samples of various crops, such as barley, chickpea, lentil, potato, rice, sorghum and wheat.

However, the vault “can store up to four and a half million samples of crops from all over the world. By preserving duplicate samples of seeds held in genebanks worldwide, the vault provides a ‘fail safe’ insurance against loss of crop diversity caused by climate change, natural disaster or war,” according to its website.

To support its cause, GoPro also created a 16-minute documentary on the seed bank and its work.

Erica Stanulis, director of global corporate social responsibility at GoPro, said in a statement: “We’re thrilled to support the Crop Trust’s efforts at Svalbard Seed Vault with the launch of GoPro’s short documentary that offers a unique, first-person perspective on the Svalbard Global Seed Vault and its mission. Our production team has spent more than a year filming, editing and interviewing the team.”

In operation since January 2008 and funded by the Norwegian government for its construction, the vault received a large collection of seed deposits Tuesday. About 50,000 samples arrived at the facility from collections in Benin, Belarus, Bosnia and Herzegovina, India, Lebanon, Mexico, Morocco, the Netherlands, Pakistan, the United States and the United Kingdom.

Also on Tuesday, a portion of seed samples from Syria which had been withdrawn from the vault in 2015 were returned to Svalbard. The International Center for Agriculture Research in the Dry Areas, previously located in Syria, had asked for the samples to be returned to it so it could continue its own seed breeding work after its facilities were affected due to the ongoing civil war in the Middle East country.

Marie Haga, executive director of the Crop Trust, said in the statement: “Today’s seed deposit at Svalbard supported by the Crop Trust shows that despite political and economic differences in other arenas, collective efforts to conserve crop diversity and produce a global food supply for tomorrow continue to be strong.”

If you would like to donate to the GoPro campaign for funding the seed vault, you can do so on this website.