Word: vaulting
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...Cartagena's Old Town was once ransomed to the Spanish crown for 2 million gold pieces by Sir Francis Drake, and it was for centuries Spain's vault for its vast South American holdings. The city earned the nickname La Heroica, having endured hundreds of sieges throughout the 17th and 18th centuries - as evidenced by the 400-year-old walls, made of mined coral, that encircle the city. But for all of Cartagena's battlements, in the modern era it has been plagued by crime, its potential as a UNESCO World Heritage site marred by kidnappings and murders. (See pictures...
...seed bank containing ancient varieties of wheat, lentils and chickpeas - and seeds can be lost forever, often before scientists even know what they have. "That's like burning books before we open them," says Cary Fowler, executive director of the Global Crop Diversity Trust, which operates the Svalbard vault together with the Norwegian government and the Nordic Genetic Resource Center in Sweden. (Luckily, a group of farsighted Iraqi scientists sent a sample of their seeds to an international seed bank in Syria, before Saddam Hussein's defeat...
...Svalbard is the ultimate backup - or as Fowler calls it, the "Noah's ark of seeds." The vault was built on the far northern Norwegian island of Longyearbyen, where the Arctic cold helps keeps the seeds viable, in case the electricity that powers the vault's cold storage should ever go. (Seeds can remain dormant but alive for centuries if they're kept cool and dry.) The location isn't an accident - should something truly horrific happen, from extreme climate change to nuclear war, remote Svalbard should remain protected, capable of rebooting global agriculture. "This is an insurance policy...
...Svalbard vault is just one in a series of investments necessary to ensure that a warmer, more populous world will still be able to feed itself. Funding for global agricultural research has dwindled in recent years, in the wake of the great success of the Green Revolution of the 1950s and '60s, which vastly increased global crop yields through intensive fertilizer use and irrigation. Bananas are one of the most important cash crops in the world, for example, yet Fowler notes that there are just six banana breeders on the planet...
...varieties, Fowler says we need to begin preparing now for the agricultural challenges of the future, using Svalbard's contents to build and breed new crops. "We've ignored the infrastructure of agriculture for too long," he says. "It's in our self-interest to fix this." The Svalbard vault may be a last resort, but it should also be the start of new Green Revolution...